Mosher: The Hackers

All processes are subject to hacking, both from external and internal entities. The IPCC process is no exception, neither is the process of writing for science journals exempt. As recent reports show Pachauri hacked the IPCC processes to make them work against themselves and bend the system to his financial ends. An inside hacker, like Pachauri, can be especially dangerous since he plays a role in structuring the very system that they hack. Not only do they exploit a system they were meant to protect, but they also act in ways to prevent detection of their hacks.

What the recent disclosures about Pachauri show is that the IPCC process is now totally compromised, compromised from the inside. Like a system exploited by a destructive hack, that system may be beyond repair. It’s time to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch, as climate scientist Hulme, spotted 101 times in the Climategate files and closely tied to Pachauri, suggested–perhaps in a moment of clarity after the discovery of the emails:

Just how was the CRU system hacked? And can such hacks be prevented or are they a very part of the nature of authoritarian systems? As discussed in our book “Climategate: The Crutape Letters , now available on Kindle and in Ebook format, the “hacks” were focused on the publication process.

The IPCC reports were intended to be summaries of the science, both what we know and what we don’t know. These summaries were written for policy makers who would use the science and its findings to take action: action to prevent climate change, mitigate it, adapt to it, and to fund new studies where knowledge was uncertain. And action is where the money is. Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.

As the mails show the hacking of the CRU process and the scientific process itself was exposed primarily because of the “pressure” put on the hackers by the FIOA process. And as the mails also show, the hackers moved to thwart the FOIA process by corrupting FOIA officers. In fact, the most egregious hack of the system, Jones’s request that people delete mails, came as the direct result of trying to cover up a hack of the process, the hack surrounding the ‘Jesus Paper.’

During the course of writing the account of Climategate, we noticed that Pachauri, was named directly in the files 11 times and he’s mentioned by title in others. Before canvassing those mails it’s key to understand how the hackers worked to subvert the IPCC process and the scientific publishing process. And finally, it’s important to understand that they are planning counter measures that will allow them to continue hacking the system with the upcoming fifth assessment report due in 2013. As Jones indicates in late 2009 ,Pachauri and Thomas [Stocker] an IPCC Co Chair took up the issue of FOIA with the full IPCC. One can’t imagine that they argued for full disclosure or full compliance with disclosure laws. As detailed in this mail Jones’ alerts Stocker, who works at Bern in Switzerland, to measures Holland suggests for the next IPCC report. Jones alerts Stocker to specific comments on Climate Audit, arming him for the next battle.

The IPCC reports are supposed to be objective summaries of the state of the science and are supposed to reference only works that are published in the peer reviewed science that met specific time deadlines. The deadlines are critical to have a fair and open process, ensuring that papers referenced have, in fact, been published and reviewed by others. Jones, however, finds such procedures to ensure fairness an impediment to his determining what is important.

By hacking the deadlines of the process, and shoe horning in a paper that would not be fully reviewed and published for over a year, a paper that contains references to another paper published after the fact, the hackers could ensure that lead author Briffa had the ammunition he needed to write the chapter the way Overpeck, his overlord, wanted it written: with a punch line more compelling than the ‘Hockey Stick’, that iconic figure of the global warming religion which “shows” that the current warming is “unprecedented in human history.” This hack is akin to check kiting or akin to planting older fossils with younger fossils as occurred in the Piltdown Man hoax.

Those are the user level hacks, but they go deeper. At the IPCC level the hacking is open to scrutiny, and as we see, the journalists following the references in the IPCC document are now finding these user level exploits. The deeper hacks, like a rootkit hack, involve the operating system of science, the science journals themselves. Manipulation of the science at the IPCC level is easy to document, but corrupting the journal process, the process that is supposed to feed the IPCC process with “trusted” information, is tougher to document.

Without the mails which detail how these hacks work, one could imagine that the IPCC could be made “hack proof” merely by adopting more controls and a more open process. The mails, however, indicate that the science publishing process has also been hacked. Editors have been compromised, and the system of peer review has been corrupted. Very simply, one can make the IPCC process as open and transparent as one likes, but as long as it is fed by a corrupt journal process, you will still get garbage science out of the IPCC process. And further, you could reform the journals all you like and the process can still be corrupted by the individual influential researcher who hides his data and his code.

Eleven Mails

The 11 mails mentioning Pachauri by name, only give hints at how the system was worked to his advantage. Reading them now in hindsight is instructive. The first from Rob Stewart to Pachauri in 1998, before Pachuari’s tenure begins, details the process of communicating about IPCC matters. As it notes, all communication should happen within the structures set up so that a traceable chain of evidence can be created. As the Climategate files show, this policy was violated, violated precisely so that the 4th assessment could be shaped in a way not reflective of the underlying science.

In the second mail Pachauri invites Hulme to a conference, initiating a relationship with Hulme that will culminate in Pachauri and Hulme working together to on UEA’s effort to win a government bid on the creation of a climate change center in England, as detailed in the third mail in the stack. That effort results in the founding of the Tyndall Centre, a center named no less than 11 times in the mails.

The interests of Hulme and Pachauri are clear. Use the science arm at CRU to drive conclusions in the IPCC that will drive funding into Tyndall and drive money into TERI, Pachauri’s organization, and CRU. The importance of funding should not be underestimated. Money works to corrupt science, not by changing the answer, but by changing the questions that get asked.

The fourth mail shows some of the TERI organization’s interests and one can see from the articles promoted in their newsletter that the agenda is clearly one of using the threat of climate change to drive a particular developing nation’s agenda.

The fifth Pachauri mail is interesting for a variety of reasons. The mail contains other mails, notably mails from Tom Wigley and Phil Jones who question the appointment of Pachauri, as they apparently believed that Pachauri was put in place by political forces, namely Bush, to serve corporate interests. This typical kneejerk reaction of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who alerted Wigley to the issue, on reflection, is somewhat laughable now. Hulme, as the mail show, defends Pachauri, his Indian partner, in the bid to get the Tyndall center, on rather odd grounds. Simply: Wigley points out that the “bushies” are behind this and Hulme defends Pachauri by arguing that perhaps Watson ,a Brit and the previous IPCC secretariat, has gone too far; and Hulme wonders why an Indian and an engineer should not be considered. Hulme strangely turns a political attack on Pachauri into an attack on his back ground. The defense seems entirely misplaced, unless of course there has been some other communications where these concerns were raised.

So why does Hulme go “racial?” Whatever the reason it’s apparent that discussions about Pachauri’s appointment don’t continue. Hulme played the race card and issue ends there. Perhaps Hulme played the race card so he would not have to explain how having Pachauri “on board” would be beneficial. Hulme’s partner is now in charge of the IPCC; and as Hulme writes, recalling the language of the conference Pachauri invited him to back in 1998, it will be a good thing to have someone in charge who understands that climate change is a North/South issue. It will also be good to have someone in charge who can funnel benefits your way.

The sixth Pachauri mail is from Tom Wigley in 2003. The topic of the mail is the strategy for responding to a single paper by Soon and Baliunas. It’s hard to fathom why a scientist would include the head of the IPCC as well as many other scientists on a mail that lays out the strategy for responding to lone contrarian paper. The Soon and Balinunas paper, did have the notoriety of being a skeptical paper accepted by the peer review science, but it was hardly a crushing blow to “the science.” Still, Wigley lays out for Pachauri, what the goal is. Rebut the paper to make the job of writing the next IPCC report, due years down the road, easier. So, the practices of just letting bad science die, or of letting individual scientists rebut the bad paper as they see fit are brushed aside. Wigley believes that there must be some sort of orchestrated effort to provide the future writers of the IPCC reports with specifically targeted ammunition. Science gets turned to producing papers to make the job of the science summarizers easier.

In the seventh mail in the stack Michael Mann appears to weigh in with his opinion. Included in the mail, is Stephan Schneider. Schneider, whose name appears at least 71 times in the mails, will later prove instrumental in getting the Jesus Paper into Chapter 6 of the 4th Assessment. He is a Trojan horse inside the journal system. But for Schneider, who “knows the drill” , the Jesus paper would never make it into the report. What Schneider and Pachauri see, of course, is that Mann is making the contrarian paper a political issue and David Halpern of the OSFT has been contacted. In the eighth mail, Jim Salinger will add his voice to the choir of those suggesting that the “bad” science be refuted rather than merely ignored. Again, one has to ask what is the head of the IPCC doing on these mails? Why do Mann and Salinger think that he will be remotely interested in the fate of a single paper?

In the ninth Parchuari mail, we see Hulme and Pachauri starting to take advantage of their connection through the Tyndall Centre, and Hulme suggests a joint publishing project. So we have Hulme, who brushed off Wigley and Jones’s political concerns about his partner Pachauri, actively engaging with the head of the IPCC to work on projects that both of their organizations will benefit from.

The 10th mail is interesting for one reason. It provides some rich irony and it shows what men of character do when a publishing process is subverted. The file contains an email from Mann and from Salinger, and both reference the turmoil cause by the Soon paper. Notably Hans Von Storch is reckoned a hero for resigning his editorship at Climate Research over the incident. The journal that he worked for had published the suspect paper, and his response and the response of other editors was resignation. Simply put, those who worked on the IPCC reports took the same stance as Von Storch, they would take their names off the IPCC report. Just as Climate Research erred in publishing the flawed Soon paper, the IPCC process has also published bogus science, even invented science where there was none.

In 2003 that one simple error was enough to get men of character to resign. Authors of the IPCC report would do well to follow their example. The incident bears some striking similarities to what we see today. The Wall Street Journal editorial by Antonio Regalado, is included in the mail from Mann.

“This week, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over
the journal’s handling of the review process that approved the study;
among them is Hans von Storch, the journal’s recently appointed
editor in chief. “It was flawed and it shouldn’t have been
published,” he said”

And most importantly, the flawed science found its way into an EPA document much as flawed science has made its way into the IPCC report:

“A reference to Dr. Soon’s paper previously found its way into
revisions suggested by the White House to an EPA report on
environmental quality. According to an internal EPA memorandum
disclosed in June, agency scientists were concerned the version
containing the White House edits “no longer accurately represents
scientific consensus on climate change.” Dr. Mann’s data showing the
hockey-stick temperature curve was deleted. In its place,
administration officials added a reference to Dr. Soon’s paper, which
the EPA memo called “a limited analysis that supports the
administration’s favored message.”

In 2003 the journal Climate Research let through a bad piece of science that challenged the “hockey stick.” That bad science made its way into an EPA document because it favored the administrations view. Clearly this was wrong. And Von Storch took the right action. And now, with the evidence that bad science has made its way into the IPCC report, its time for the responsible parties to follow the fine example of Von Storch.

The 11th mail which mentions Pachauri is important for understanding the events leading up to Phil Jones’ refusal to give data to Warwick Hughes, but its relation to Pachauri is tangential, except for the hint it contains about the kind of rhetoric Pachauri would use to further his cause, an early clue into his character. Buried in a series of editorials about Michael Mann forward by Briffa to Jones, we find the following 2005 gem from Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute:

“Not long ago the IPCC’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, compared
eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler. “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s?” Pachauri asked in a Danish newspaper. “If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing” Lomborg’s sin was merely to follow the consensus practice of economists in applying a discount to present costs for future benefits, and comparing the range of outcomes with other world problems alongside climate change. It is hard to judge what is worse: Pachauri’s appalling judgment in resorting to reductio ad Hitlerum, or his abysmal ignorance of basic economics. In either case, it is hard to have much confidence in the policy advice the IPCC might have.”

Looking at the Pachauri mails in the Climategate files doesn’t provide any new examples of wrongdoing. We don’t need any. What it does do is give a sense of how the men who hacked the climate science operated. How they reasoned, how they strategized and what they viewed as threats and opportunities. If we want to improve the science in climate science and build a trusted system, we need to understand the “black hats.”

Building a trusted system for climate science

With the IPCC’s reputation in tatters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of Pachauri’s man at CRU, Hulme. Perhaps the IPCC has run its course. If trust is to be rebuilt in climate science it must start from the bottom up, with the fundamental data and code of climate science. The IPCC process will always be hackable, and so to will the climate science journals. Cleaning up the mess must start at the foundation of science with open access to the data and the code used in climate science.

The notion that science can move forward while individual climate scientists hide data from their critics is antithetical to the dictates of reason. CRU and others have no more excuses. All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use. Confidential data should not be used; it is not necessary to the science. Phil Jones should be removed as an advisor to NOAA on data archiving and access. That’s having a black hat hacker in charge of the hardware. The code of climate science should likewise be freely available. In particular, we should press climate science to adopt a GPL license, one that enforces sharing of code. In part GPL is required because on more than one occasion some climate scientists have used the public code of others without re-sharing it. For example, they have used public code, modified it in undocumented ways, and refused to share the derivative work.

At the level of the journals trust can only be rebuilt by changes in people and principles. The list of people who need to go is easy to draw up. More importantly the Journals need to adopt principles of reproducible research. If a reviewer or official “replication” expert cannot recompile the science from source, both data and code, the science needs to be rejected.

Above the journal level at the IPCC level of course Pachauri needs to go. But the risk of him being replaced with a less crude hacker is high. The issue is that trust cannot be blindly placed in people. The entire IPCC process must be opened. We want to watch that process first hand and be eyewitness to every word.

The Hackers

All processes are subject to hacking, both from external and internal entities. The IPCC process is no exception, neither is the process of writing for science journals exempt. As recent reports show Pachauri hacked the IPCC processes to make them work against themselves and bend the system to his financial ends. An inside hacker, like Pachauri, can be especially dangerous since they play a role in structuring the very system that they hack. Not only do they exploit a system they were meant to protect, but they also act in ways to prevent detection of their hacks.

What the recent disclosures about Pachauri show is that the IPCC process is now totally compromised, compromised from the inside. Like a system exploited by a destructive hack, that system may be beyond repair. It’s time to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch, as climate scientist Hulme, spotted 101 times in the Climategate files and closely tied to Pachauri, suggested–perhaps in a moment of clarity after the discovery of the emails:

Just how was the IPCC system hacked? And can such hacks be prevented or are they a very part of the nature of authoritarian systems? As discussed in our book “Climategate: The Crutape Letters , now available on Kindle and in Ebook format, the “hacks” were focused on the publication process.

The IPCC reports where intended to be summaries of the science, both what we know and what we don’t know. These summaries were written for policy makers who would use the science and its findings to take action: action to prevent climate change, mitigate it, adapt to it, and to fund new studies where knowledge was uncertain. And action is where the money is. Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.

As the mails show the hacking of the IPCC process and the scientific process itself was exposed primarily because of the “pressure” put on the hackers by the FIOA process. And as the mails also show, the hackers moved to thwart the FOIA process by corrupting FOIA officers. In fact, the most egregious hack of the system, Jones’ request that people delete mails, came as the direct result of trying to cover up a hack of the IPCC process, the hack surrounding the ‘Jesus Paper.’

During the course of writing the account of Climategate, we noticed that Pachauri, was named directly in the files 11 times and he’s mentioned by title in others. Before canvassing those mails it’s key to understand how the hackers worked to subvert the IPCC process and the scientific publishing process. And finally, it’s important to understand that they are planning counter measures that will allow them to continue hacking the system with the upcoming fifth assessment report due in 2013.As Jones indicates in late 2009 ,Pachauri and Thomas [Stocker] an IPCC Co Chair took up the issue of FOIA with the full IPCC. One can’t imagine that they argued for full disclosure or full compliance with disclosure laws. As detailed in this mail Jones’ alerts Stocker, who works at Bern in Switzerland, to measures Holland suggests for the next IPCC report. Jones alerts Stocker to specific comments on Climate Audit, arming him for the next battle.

The IPPC reports are supposed to be an objective summary of the state of the science and are supposed to reference only works that are published in the peer reviewed science that met specific time deadlines. The deadlines are critical to have a fair and open process, ensuring that papers referenced have, in fact, been published and reviewed by others. Jones, however, finds such procedures to ensure fairness an impediment to him determining what is important.

By hacking the deadlines of the process, and shoe horning in a paper that would not be fully reviewed and published for over a year, a paper that contains references to another paper published after the fact, the hackers could ensure that lead author Briffa had the ammunition he needed to write the chapter the way Overpeck, his overlord, wanted it written: with a punch line more compelling than the ‘Hockey Stick’, that iconic figure of the global warming religion which “shows” that the current warming is “unprecedented in human history.” This hack is akin to check kiting or akin to planting older fossils with younger fossils as occurred in the Piltdown Man hoax.

Those are the user level hacks, but the hacks go deeper. At the IPPC level, the hacks are open to scrutiny and as we see journalists now following the references in the IPCC document they are finding these user level exploits. The deeper hacks, like a rootkit hack, involve the operating system of science, the science journals themselves. Manipulation of the science at the IPCC level is easy to document, but corrupting the journal process, the process that is supposed to feed the IPCC process with “trusted” information, is tougher to document.

Without the mails which detail how these hacks work, one could imagine that the IPCC could be made “hack proof” merely by adopting more controls and a more open process. The mails, however, indicate that the science publishing process has also been hacked. Editors have been compromised, and the system of peer review has been corrupted. Very simply, one can make the IPCC process as open and transparent as one likes, but as long as it is fed by a corrupt journal process, you will still get garbage science out of the IPCC process. And further, you could reform the journals all you like and the process can still be corrupted by the individual influential researcher who hides his data and his code.

Eleven Mails

The 11 mails mentioning Pachauri by name, only give hints at how the system was worked to his advantage. Reading them now in hindsight is instructive. The first from Rob Stewart to Pachauri in 1998, before Pachuari’s tenure begins, details the process of communicating about IPCC matters. As it notes, all communication should happen within the structures set up so that a traceable chain of evidence can be created. As the Climategate files show, this policy was violated, violated precisely so that the 4th assessment could be shaped in a way not reflected in the underlying science.

In the second mail Pachauri invites Hulme to a conference, initiating a relationship with Hulme that will culminate in Pachauri and Hulme working together to on UEA’s effort to win a government bid on the creation of a climate change center in England, as detailed in the third mail in the stack. That effort results in the founding of the Tyndall Center, a center named no less than 11 times in the mails.

The interests of Hulme and Pachauri are clear. Use the science arm at CRU to drive conclusions in the IPCC that will drive funding into Tyndall and drive money into TERI, Pachauri’s organization, and CRU. The important of funding should not be underestimated. Money works to corrupt science, not by changing the answer, but by changing the questions that get asked.

The fourth mail shows some of the TERI organization’s interests and one can see from the articles promoted in their newsletter that the agenda is clearly one of using the threat of climate change to drive a particular developing nation agenda.

The fifth Pachauri mail is interesting for a variety of reasons. The mail contains other mails, notably mails from Tom Wigley and Phil Jones who question the appointment of Pachauri, as they apparently believed that Pachauri was put in place by political forces, namely Bush, to serve corporate interests. This typical kneejerk reaction of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who alerted Wigley to the issue, on reflection, is somewhat laughable now. Hulme, as the mail show, defends Pachauri, his Indian partner, in the bid to get the Tyndall center, on rather odd grounds. Simply: Wigley points out that the “bushies” are behind this and Hulme defends Pachauri by arguing that perhaps Watson ,a Brit and the previous IPCC secretariat, has gone too far; and Hulme wonders why an Indian and an engineer should not be considered. Hulme strangely turns a political attack on Pachauri into an attack on his back ground. The defense seems entirely misplaced, unless of course there has been some other communications where these concerns were raised.

So why does Hulme go “racial?” Whatever the reason its apparent that discussions about Pachauri’s appointment don’t continue. Hulme played the race card and issue ends there. Perhaps Hulme played the race card so he would not have to explain how having Pachauri “on board” would be beneficial. Hulme’s partner is now in charge of the IPCC; and as Hulme writes, recalling the language of the conference Pachauri invited him to back in 1998, it will be a good thing to have someone in charge who understands that climate change is a North/South issue. It will also be good to have some one in charge who can funnel benefits your way.

The sixth Pachauri mail is from Tom Wigley in 2003. The topic of the mail is the strategy for responding to a single paper by Soon and Baliunas. It’s hard to fathom why a scientist would include the head of the IPCC as well as many other scientists on a mail that lays out the strategy for responding to lone contrarian paper. The Soon and Balinunas paper, did have the notoriety of being a skeptical paper accepted by the peer review science, but it was hardly a crushing blow to “the science.” Still, Wigley lays out for Pachauri, what the goal is. Rebut the paper to make the job of writing the next IPCC report, due years down the road, easier. So, the practices of just letting bad science die, or of letting individual scientists rebut the bad paper as they see fit are brushed aside. Wigley believes that there must be some sort of orchestrated effort to provide the future writers of the IPCC reports with specifically targeted ammunition. Science gets turned to producing papers to make the job of the science summarizers easier.

In the seventh mail in the stack Michael Mann appears to weigh in with his opinion. Included in the mail, is Stephan Schneider. Schneider, whose name appears at least 71 times in the mails, will later prove instrumental in getting the Jesus Paper into Chapter 6 of the 4th Assessment. He is a Trojan horse inside the journal system. But for Schneider, who “knows the drill” , the Jesus paper would never make it into the report. What Schneider and Pachauri see, of course, is that Mann is making the contrarian paper a political issue and David Halpern of the OSFT has been contacted. In the eighth mail, Jim Salinger will add his voice to the choir of those suggesting that the “bad” science be refuted rather than merely ignored. Again, one has to ask what is the head of the IPCC doing on these mails? Why does Mann and Salinger think that he will be remotely interested in the fate of a single paper?

In the ninth Parchuari mail, we see Hulme and Pachauri starting to take advantage of their connection through the Tyndall Center, and Hulme suggests a joint publishing project. So we have Hulme, who brushed off Wigley’s and Jones’ political concerns about his partner Pachauri, actively engaging with the head of the IPCC to work on projects that both of their organizations will benefit from.

The 10th mail is interesting for one reason. It provides some rich irony and it shows what men of character do when a publishing process is subverted. The file contains a mail from Mann and from Salinger, and both reference the turmoil cause by the Soon paper. Notably Hans Von Storch is reckoned a hero for resigning his editorship at Climate Research over the incident. The journal that he worked for had published the suspect paper, and his response and the response of other editors was resignation. Simply put, those who worked on the IPCC reports took the same stance as Von Storch, they would take their names off the IPCC report. Just as Climate Research erred in publishing the flawed Soon paper, the IPCC process has also published bogus science, even invented science where there was none.

In 2003 that one simple error was enough to get a men of character to resign. Author’s of the IPCC report would do well to follow their example. The incident bears some striking similarities to what we see today. The Wall Street Journal editorial by Antonio Regalado, is included in the mail from Mann.

“This week, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over
the journal’s handling of the review process that approved the study;
among them is Hans von Storch, the journal’s recently appointed
editor in chief. “It was flawed and it shouldn’t have been
published,” he said”

And most importantly, the flawed science found its way into an EPA document much as flawed science has made its way into the IPCC report:

“A reference to Dr. Soon’s paper previously found its way into
revisions suggested by the White House to an EPA report on
environmental quality. According to an internal EPA memorandum
disclosed in June, agency scientists were concerned the version
containing the White House edits “no longer accurately represents
scientific consensus on climate change.” Dr. Mann’s data showing the
hockey-stick temperature curve was deleted. In its place,
administration officials added a reference to Dr. Soon’s paper, which
the EPA memo called “a limited analysis that supports the
administration’s favored message.”

In 2003 the journal Climate Research let through a bad piece of science that challenged the “hockey stick.” That bad science made it’s way into an EPA document because it favored the administrations view. Clearly this was wrong. And Von Storch took the right action. And now, with the evidence that bad science has made its way into the IPCC report, its time for the responsible parties to follow the fine example of Von Storch.

The 11th mail which mentions Pachauri is important for understanding the events leading up to Phil Jones’ refusal to give data to Warwick Hughes, but it’s relation to Pachauri is tangential, except for the hint it contains about the kind of rhetoric Pachauri would use to further his cause, an early clue into his character. Buried in a series of editorials about Michael Mann forward by Briffa to Jones, we find the following 2005 gem from Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute:

“Not long ago the IPCC’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, compared
eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler. “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s?” Pachauri asked in a Danish newspaper. “If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing” Lomborg’s sin was merely to follow the consensus practice of economists in applying a discount to present costs for future benefits, and comparing the range of outcomes with other world problems alongside climate change. It is hard to judge what is worse: Pachauri’s appalling judgment in resorting to reductio ad Hitlerum, or his abysmal ignorance of basic economics. In either case, it is hard to have much confidence in the policy advice the IPCC might have.”

Looking at the Pachauri mails in the Climategate files doesn’t provide any new examples of wrong doing. We don’t need any. What it does do is give a sense of how the men who hacked the climate science operated. How they reasoned, how they strategized and what they viewed as threats and opportunities. If we want to improve the science in climate science and build a trusted system, we need to understand the “black hats.”

Building a trusted system for climate science

With the IPCC’s reputation in tatters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of Pachauri’s man at CRU, Hulme. Perhaps the IPCC has run its course. If trust is to be rebuilt in climate science it must start from the bottom up, with the fundamental data and code of climate science. The IPCC process will always be hackable, and so to will the climate science journals. Cleaning up the mess must start at the foundation of science with open access to the data and the code used in climate science.

The notion that science can move forward while individual climate scientists hide data from their critics is antithetical to the dictates of reason. CRU and others have no more excuses. All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use. Confidential data should not be used; it is not necessary to the science. Phil Jones should be removed as an advisor to NOAA on data archiving and access. That’s having a black hat hacker in charge of the hardware. The code of climate science should likewise be freely available. In particular, we should press climate science to adopt a GPL license, one that enforces sharing of code. In part GPL is required because on more than one occasion some climate scientists have used the public code of others without re-sharing it. For example, they have used public code, modified it in undocumented ways, and refused to share the derivative work.

At the level of the journals trust can only be rebuilt by changes in people and principles. The list of people who need to go is easy to draw up. More importantly the Journals need to adopt principles of reproducible research. If a reviewer or official “replication” expert cannot recompile the science from source, both data and code, the science needs to be rejected.

Above the journal level at the IPCC level of course Pachauri needs to go. But the risk of him being replaced with a less crude hacker is high. The issue is that trust cannot be blindly placed in people. The entire IPCC process must be opened. We want to watch that process first hand and be eyewitness to every word.

Lomborgs “The sceptical environmentalist” has been scrutinized by every green lunatic of the planet, they never found a substantial mistake with the data. It’s of far higher qualtiy than the IPCC rubbish. Pachauri must be out of his mind for quite a long time now. I’m really appaled. I knew Pachauri is greedy, but i didn’t know how bad a character he is. I’m german, i know the history of Germany and i don’t take such utterances lightly.

Internal control is missing here. Pachuri and too many others have access and motive to corrupt both the files and the reports. For better internal control authorities and duties need to be segregated. Pachuri is corrupt. The EPA is operating off corrupted reports and processes. Pachauri is now woven into money and fees. Someone will have to clean house.

CAUTION: Not to be distracted by the fact that UN’s IPCC has played just an instrumental role in the global warming scam, the master minds are safely outside. This process is intended to blame just the servants not the masters.

When was the IPCC anything other than an adjunct to a political end? Calling for reform and scientific purity in the IPCC is like a demand for a brothel to focus more on character-building.

The perceived need to serve a political agenda and the natural desire to grab a share of the funding attached to that process has made it impossible for climate science to remain an honest broker. The reform is going to have to be deeper than some roster changes and dumping Pachauri.

“The IPPC reports are supposed to be an objective summary of the state of the science”

NO

Why do people keep reading it and not getting it.
Cut out the fluff between the meat and just read it.

“The IPCC was established to provide the decision-makers with an objective source of information about HUMAN-INDUCED climate change.”

“The IPCC was established to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with
an objective source of information about climate change. The IPCC does not conduct any research nor does
it monitor climate related data or parameters. Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis
the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant
to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change”

“The Jesus Paper”… I love it! Now I’m all over the Bishop Hill blog reading more about this mysterious paper. So far, the story is very similar to the Da Vinci Code except instead of there being a murder-mystery we have a hockey-stick mystery and instead of the nefarious Sir Leigh Teabing we have the equally unpleasant Sir John Houghton. It’s all very dark and creepy.

All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use.
This should be the case not only for data but also for the published papers. Often it takes the papers to make sense of the data or to see how the data is used. Therefore the papers should also be accessible to everyone without a ‘pay-wall’. Finally, the reviews [or at least, the reviewers’ identity] should be part of the electronic version of the paper. One could argue that some fields and/or obscure journals might be exempt [for various reasons, e.g. economic], but Journals with high impact factor should be open.

I just posted this on RC. I wonder how long before it gets deleted.
“The problem lies with the hypocrisy of the IPCC’s position which will do the most damage. They have always pushed the position that the disastrous scenarios they present are backed by peer reviewed science.

It is very clear from this and other recent examples that this is not always the case. Now errors can happen I will grant but this very clearly makes it appear that those errors were identified at an early stage by other scientists and ignored in favour of presenting a more polictically powerful position. This is hypocrisy.

I think Pachauri’s response when the Indian report came out questioning the 2035 date and the level of melting glaciers in the himalayas he dismissed it as “voodoo science. Thats hypocrisy of the highest level.”

Its amazing that RC’s response to the current IPCC goings on misses the point entirely. Its not that the IPCC misses a mistake, its that when pre-warned about flaws in what they are planning publish they ignore the science in favour of sensationalisation to present a more alarming message.

It’s now time for all scientists to take a stance. Either they continue to back the IPCC and stand behind all its findings, or they state in no uncertain terms the IPCC is at least scientifically corrupt and it must be discredited outright and disbanded. Those that remain silent will be assumed to be in the former camp, and they must know this and take whatever consequences that will arise as the Climatgate continues to grow.

Great analysis and presentation. After just reading the climategate-CRUtape letters book and this article, am convinced of Mosher’s superior writing talent, and that this is the way to get the facts of the stories to a wider audience – not just to put the evidence coldly in the face of the public and press to be ignored, but to present the wider context in an easy to understand manner – not an easy feat!
Glad that he is on “our” side of the science – along with Steve, Watts, Lucia, Willis, and all of the others. Good show.

For a long time the IPCC has been demonstrating that it is less interested in scientific truth and more interested in advocacy. Like when Chris Landsea resigned because his boss was giving the media the IPCC story on more hurricanes etc from global warming – and yet the research hadn’t started. Like with using the Mann hockey stick for IPCC 2001 when at the time the consensus was for a medieval warming period.

Unfortunately this reflects badly on climate science when most of the scientists do excellent work. And reflects especially badly on the IPCC reports even though 90% of the IPCC technical reports are excellent.

For those who like to see an overly powerful organization get its comeuppance these are great days.

But for those who want to understand the climate and what the future holds it’s a challenge.

Great work and I have ordered a copy of your book – due to arrive here in UK in the next two weeks.

I think you might be being a bit too hard on Mike Hulme, however. I have heard him on radio , especially the Today programme ( flagship BBC news pgme), several times and he comes across as measured and reasonable.

It may well be that he took the opportunity to gain funding for the TRC. Perhaps he is now less sanguine about that and in some sense wishes to make amends.

Steve, this is an enormously helpful narrative, a seedbed as some of us try to get our heads around what we should submit to the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into CRU and Climategate. Very neat appropriation of ‘hack’, totally justified. An inside job indeed. But the hackers’ own source code has been revealed. What a fantastic struggle that’s made us all part of.

Objectively speaking a lot of house cleaning is needed at IPCC. If they want any sembelance of believability they need all new blood at the top and ones with level heads that recognise transparency and truth need to replace hype and bull. Seems like these people think they are creating a Hollywood movie and if they don’t knock your socks off with hyperbole they aren’t doing their job. The more I think about it though that is essense of the whole AGW movement from all corners of the blogosphere to NASA, CRU, IPCC and even the Met Office in the UK. It is all about who can “Wow” the strongest and the loudest with ever growing “fish stories”. Real science now is not good enough it has been scraped in favor of a flurry of ever stonger dire adjitives. This tact has back-fired Miserably. Why?…….The public reads this as reasons to question the validity of everything they say. Peoples BS meters have now pegged out. Sincerely, John

The IPCC is but one of the first ripples. This is a big pond and there are lots more ripples that have not yet been noticed or commented on. Even local councils have “Climate Change” policies on their books her in NZ. To turn back this tide is going to take an awful lot of doing and a great many people are going to have to eat humble pie and admit they are very gulible. The money involved is not even worth trying to add up. This is the biggest con in the history of the human race and I am not sure we are capable of undoing it.

“John from MN (14:27:34) :
[…]
Seems like these people think they are creating a Hollywood movie and if they don’t knock your socks off with hyperbole they aren’t doing their job.”

Very good analogy. “Suspension of disbelief” doesn’t work anymore. The special effects weren’t convincing enough (no warming), and the actors were too wooden (Gore). Pachauri misread the script; he was assigned the role of the ethnic-minority-sidekick of the western hero (Nobel price ceremony) but he suddenly plays the evil supervillain (comparing danish vegan professors of statistics to… and grabbing all the cash he can). The audience has lost the plot and leaves the theater in droves.

Your timing for this great article being posted on Anthony’s site is flawless. With so many negative aspects to the IPCC AR4 report hitting us so fast, your article integrates it all into a focused discussion of the scientific process.

Thank you.

OT. Regarding the fundamental motivation of CAGW leaders & followers, I do not think it is money. Money is just the efficient motivation (to steal a paraphrase from Aristotle’s caustion theory). The causitive motivation at root is some kind of hatred of . . . . something.

Steve, this piece is a coup d’etat. To take hold of the little word “hack” and weave it with such artful grace into every detail of AGW at Hackers Central, so that if you now ask me what “hacker” means, I will without thinking or blinking say, it means perverting from within… so of course the emails are hackers emails… and if they get hacked that’s the name of the game… their game.

I demonstrate conclusively that the scientific community knew about these Glaciergate errors by their being exposed in a peer-reviewed journal in 2005, which was essentially the substance of a chapter from a book published in 2004 by an authority on the Himalayas. Syed Hasnain’s pronouncements are shown to be myths, and worse. The paper appeared in Himalayan Journal of Sciences, entitled

“Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.”

In light of that, I find it almost certain that Pachauri and a lot of others knew that these were lies years before AR4 was published.

Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi: Goldman Sachs: The Great American Bubble Machine
BUBBLE #6 Global Warming
And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.
The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance…

If ‘corrupt’ were used it would be unnecessary to explain: “Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.”
Perhap ‘hack’ is used to turn the accusation of illegal hacker on the supposed victims of the actions of our whistleblower: Well who’s the hacker then?

But I dont think this works because that accusation long ago failed to prevent scrutiny of the contents of the FOIA hack – not only in the intended audience of this article, but also in the audience of many mainstream media. And attitudes to the criminality of the computer hacker have always been ambivalent, like to the robin hood, the Pretty Boy Floyd, the Ned Kelly.

Instead, what the use of the term ‘hacker’ might do is unnecessarily increase an aire of nerdy exclusivity that is already thick enough in discussion of IPCC corruption.

But any time I read alarmist blogs they shout down anyone who mentions a non peer reviewed report. And every time I read a newspaper they say the science is settled “from the scientists at the IPCC”. But the reporters have been conned as well, they were told the IPCC report was by thousands of scientists, not activists for WWF and Greenpeace.

Everytime I hear the news I hear “Scientists at the IPCC say….” and then some scare story. That is why this is a bigger story than alarmists would like to admit.

My government makes bedtime stories to scare my children. When I complain about it I am told : “The IPCC says…”. So now my kids think the dog is going to drown in a few years. And the CO2 monster is going to come and get them while they sleep.

Did anyone at the IPCC find their errors? Did they announce them? Did they get a headline as big as the scare stories? No they did not. They hoped no one would question them.

I am no scientist. I am a member of the public and I deserve to be told about these issues. I trusted the IPCC like millions of other people. I read stories which worry me, and make me worried for my children, and the planet. I was prepared to pay my taxes to save the planet. And then I find out I have been lied to. Not once but many times. How many more lies need to be uncovered before the settled science becomes unsettled?

How about I put a report together and tell everyone that glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate and COULD be gone by 2025 IF CO2 levels continue to rise at the current levels. And I have a confidence of 90%. Should my report be considered? Maybe if I add that millions MAY die of thirst. Or POSSIBLY get drowned in the tidal wave of water down the mountain? Is it good enough yet?

Half way through your book-love it. I really liked and smiled alot over page 31. “Jones has no such option. He is his science. The same goes for Mann. He is his hockey stick”. He is a hockey puck too!
The team as you explained is made up of a lot of disgusting folks .The recent events as described above continue to point this out. Keep up the good work.
I hope you sell millions of copies.

Mr. Mosher: This ismy first comment submission anywhere. To date I have been a reader only. I concur with most of what you have said. However, I take strong objection to your characterization of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Refer to rasmusen1.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-research-dispute-over.html for text of CRU/climategate email by Mr. de Freitas wherein he compellingly defends the review process for that paper. Refer to climateaudit.org/2006/04/27/treydte-moberg-soon-and-baliunas/ for Mr. Mc Intyre analysis of Hockey Team double standards. Mr.Von Storch is no hero. He should have stood up to the orchestrated campaign by CRU/GISS/Mann et al to micromanage so-called peer review so only “correct” papers were published. Soon and Baliunas, whatever its technical flaws may be, is not remotely close to “bad science”. That terminology is most appropriately applied to the “hockey stick” and methodologies employed and attitudes displayed by the group Mr. McIntyre has called the Hockey Team.

Despite all of this stuff there is still a central thesis which may yet turn out to be correct, even if there has been meddling, distortion, invention and manipulationon the part of some of the so called scientists. Those who’ve resorted to chicanery in order to create facts to fit to the thesis are guilty of a common human tendency. We invest a great deal of emotion/commitment in our beliefs – though there may be little in the way of supporting grounds – and we don’t like letting go of them even when counter evidence starts to come in, and those amongst us who are less scrupulous can be tempted to attempt to make reality fit the theory instead of the reverse. There’s also the crowd/herd instinct at work. The majority of humans like to stay with the bigger pack. It takes courage and ruthlessness to stand alone against a tide of differing opinion/theory and those qualities don’t come together in more than a small percentage of humans. Hence the number of scientists adhering to a theory that seems to me to be lacking substantial support in terms of evidence and logic. And yet the theory might still be right. The sheer physical scale, the complexity and the lengthy time factors involved in planetary climate mean, in my view, that this thing still has to work itself out.

There has been a temperature stand-still for 8 years but that is far from proving the AGWists wrong. Just as evidence of malpractice so far isn’t yet enough to blow them out of the water. It would take something like raw data for the last 150 years showing no change or change in the wrong direction from temp stations around the world that haven’t been moved and whose environmental characteristics haven’t changed by UHI encroachment effects for example. Until that kind of evidence comes in or, for example, the current stand-still continues beyond the duration of factors that might be explainable within the terms of the warmists position there remains the possibility that they might be right. It might come to that, but this sceptic prefers to wait and see. The evidence and trends are not clear either way I believe and the hacking, misinformation, and manipulation don’t kill the case for the AGW position on their own. There’s more work to be done by good people like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre and others, and maybe a lot more time needs to pass, but at least for the moment the bandwagon has been slowed.

He will cite the “storm in a tea cup” created by the deniers/contrarians.
He will defend to the end the “robust” science used by the IPCC
He will defend to the end the IPCC itself and it’s processes.
He will state that the IPCC is more important than an individual.
He will state that the upcoming 5th assessment report is the most important of all and that it deserves to be formulated without the distractions created by the deniers/contrarians.
He will be accompanied by Yve De Boer.

The timing will depend on how quickly errors like glaciergate accumulate over the coming weeks. If nothing new is exposed, his resignation will be announced quietly in a few months.
If however more errors are exposed, his resignation will be sooner.

By the way, the real culprit is Yve de Boer, the head of the UNFCCC
All roads lead to him. Nothing happens without is direction.

@John Whitman
“…Regarding the fundamental motivation of CAGW leaders & followers, I do not think it is money. ..The causitive motivation at root is some kind of hatred of . . . . something.”

Mosher’s article is not really quite on the ball – the IPCC hackers were never really hackers of an independent scientific organisation. They were, and remain, green activists. The way the IPCC was set up made it an obvious place for activists to work. If you weren’t a true believer, I guess you didn’t apply to work there.

Towards the end, I am sure that the atmosphere there will be similar to that in the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, or Jonestown just before the KoolAid. These people do not hate humanity as such – they just believe with all their heart and soul that their view of the world is right, and that because of this whatever they do to further that view cannot be wrong.

In a way, we are lucky we are catching them this early. Quasi-religious believer groups of this kind (the scientologists are one obvious example) have been known to kill people, convinced that they were doing right. Certainly they would ignore any major disruption and death caused as a consequence of their policies.

What this shows is that humanity in general is a sucker for this kind of mass movement. Charles Mackay’s book on Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds should be a set text in all classrooms….

NYT can’t help itself. This was originally headlined “Scientists Say Ozone Hole’s Repair May Worsen Global Warming” which still comes up at the top of the browser when u link here. And it’s already being touted on Fox News?

NYT: The Ozone Hole Is Mending. Now for the ‘But.’
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
But in a new report, scientists say there is a downside: its repair may contribute to global warming.
It turns out that the hole led to the formation of moist, brighter-than-usual clouds that shielded the Antarctic region from the warming induced by greenhouse gas emissions over the last two decades, scientists write in Wednesday’s issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
“The recovery of the hole will reverse that,” said Ken Carslaw, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the paper. “Essentially, it will accelerate warming in certain parts of the Southern Hemisphere.”..
For their research, the authors of the new study relied on meteorological data recorded between 1980 and 2000, including global wind speeds recorded by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts…
But Judith Perlwitz, a University of Colorado professor and a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that although the paper’s data were sound, she questioned the conclusions..

Okay, I was distracted earlier (see previous comment) but now that I’ve finally finished reading Mosher’s article in it’s entirety I have to say that I’m left feeling underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the work that Mosher has done and I’m very sympathetic to his goal of exposing IPCC duplicity. However, this article fails to accomplish that. It’s attempting to weave together too many disparate instances of IPCC corruption into a coherent and compelling hacker narrative and ends up accomplishing none of the above. Instead, the narrative comes across as awkward, forced, confusing, and fragmented.

Now if anyone wants me to provide specific examples of what I’m talking about then please say so. Otherwise I’ll just assume that no one is interested and get back to calculating my carbon footprint with my trusty abacus.

The point you make about the theory may at its basic level be correct is right. The solution is simple. You test it in a lab. Co2 forcing is a testable phenomenon. As is the supposed saturation of the wings idea when the temperature, humidity and pressure reduce. I’m a physicist. For me the whole circus, and it is a circus, has people running off in all directions assuming Co2 re-emission heats a surface the way it has been modelled. They have been assuming this for over a 100 years. It doesn’t make it true.
I’ve seen theories where this is no accounting for convection or the minimum energy principle and thermodynamics. No accounting for example interesting experiments such as Japanese food scientists tested FIR forcing on heating strawberries and found it does not produce a surface heating rate greater than the standard convection method they use (air at 150 degrees blown over the strawberries).
So never mind the noise. The only thing that you should have in your mind is this: If someone asks just say, Show me in an experiment how more Co2 heats a surface by re-emission of IR in the presence of realistic atmospheric components? That’s it. They show that, or at least try to and the rest can be understood in context. They don’t and they are living in dreamland. I come across assumptions like this all the time in my work. I also make them myself and have to catch myself on. But the job of a scientist and to a lesser extent, any logical thinking person, is always to disregard, check and test/find out someway.
That is the biggest HACK of all. This assumption told often enough becomes fact.

Thank you for this very interesting and cogent piece, Mr Mosher. The use of “hack” to describe abuse of the process from the inside is particularly insightful.

The point taken up by our friend Mr Lief (at 13:43:34) interests me. “All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use.” Why just climate science? And why all of climate science?

It is not the subject that dictates the need for free access to the fullest information, it is the use to which it is put. If people wish to do research and put it to private uses, there is no reason for anyone else to know all the details of what they have discovered. It is when the conclusions are put forward as a reason for steps to be taken to affect peoples lives that the game changes.

A boffin in a lab can experiment for years inventing a medicine to cure some widespread major ailment, be it the common cold, rheumatism or the inability of some spouses to stop nagging. His work is of no consequence to anyone until he tries to sell the resulting potion. At that point he must disclose every crossed T and dotted I of his research. He must do so because his product will affect ordinary people.

So it is with all scientific research that results in a product, service or political policy that will affect the little people. It is not just climate science but all science that must be subject to this rule. And it is not all climate science but only that which leads to proposals to take steps that affect the little people.

” nigel jones (16:33:02) : More than that, they’ve managed to get “peer review” elevated to the status of a stamp of inviolable truth. This is something it clearly can’t be. ”

Your point is the first time I have heard of this idea on “peer review”. I think the idea is correct. Science is (should be) an ongoing process that self-corrects, peer review is part of the self correction but not the end product.

This may have been already mentioned, but von Storch resigned from Climate Research because of a dispute with the publisher, not because the 2003 Soon & Baliunas paper was poor science or because the review process was tainted.

This is so totally off topic I’m not sure where to post it. However, since deep science is an interest of yours and it does deal with emission/absorption lines and their frequency and probability of emission (topics in climate science) I thought you might want to have a look. The video was first published yesterday.

p.s. maybe Mosher, or Watts, or any of you cowboys here for that matter, would care to tell us how the labyrinthine conspiracy you so meticulously “document” affects the radiative forcing properties of greenhouse gases. Fire at will.

The term ‘hacked’ as it applies to the IPCC internals workings seems odd to me. I am familiar with ‘fixed’ and ‘rigged’. It was a great way for pockets to be lined, but in the end, it all comes undone.
The AGW baby gets tossed with the money laundry water.

I’m a relative newbie to the “climate wars”, having arrived on the scene about 2 weeks “BC” [Before Climategate] … and am still catching up on the history!

That series of Lindzen videos was among the first that I had watched, during my explorations. And the frames to which you pointed were very high on the list of items that really grabbed my attention.

Although at that time, not knowing who the major actors were, Hulme’s name didn’t register on my brain; so, even though I have subsequently written about some of Hulme’s activities, I hadn’t made that particular connection.

As an aside, I even had a (somewhat abbreviated!) letter to the editor published in Canada’s National Post – correcting Terence Corcoran’s depiction of Hulme (in his otherwise excellent 2 part Dec. 19/21 series).

“I was a Convening Lead Author for the scenarios chapter for the IPCC Third Assessment Report, as well as a Lead Author and Review Editor for other chapters. I was also the Manager of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre between 1997 and 2002.”

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the “scenarios chapter” of TAR which had been based on the SRES that were disputed by Castles & Henderson (whose critique, of course, was dismissed)?

Another 2 enlightening tidbits from Hulme’s own site (particularly considering the “spiritual” aspect of his thinking that was highlighted by Lindzen in the video):

“I am a signatory to the Oxford Declaration ‘Science and faith unite on biodiversity’ under the auspicies of the James Martin Institute, issued 7 December 2007″

And – listed amongst his Personal Influences – “I am an evangelical Christian and member of the Church of England, and my theology is broadly aligned with that espoused by Fulcrum, a movement seeking to act as a point of balance within the Anglican Church.”

And a search at the Fulcrum link from the above yields zilch on Hulme, but (predictably?!) a “climate” search is, again, more fruitful (which suggests that Hulme’s thoughts might have … uh … multiplied)

A shorter version of this article was published as “How to make God’s promise good”, in The Church Times, 13 July 2007 and is republished with permission.

Opening para (not unexpectedly) reads as follows:

“The climate is changing, and there is now a very high confidence by an overwhelming majority of scientists that human activity is a significant part of that change. The global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased markedly since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values. Much of this is due to fossil fuel use, changes in land use, and agriculture.”

So, in conclusion, my response to Dave Andrews (14:11:10) concern that Steve Mosher “might be being a bit too hard on Mike Hulme”, is no, I don’t think so.

They did anything, said anything, published anything, doctored anything, erased anything, blackballed anyone and denied anything the could to keep the gravy train rolling into thier slush funds.
You want to sort through all that sticky mess to try and salvage it?
That would be like trying to repair the WTC Towers after they pancacked.

what concerns radiative physics is the heat absorbtion of c02 in the atmosphere. It absorbs radiation at 13.7-16.3 microns with a peak of 15 microns – yet radiation on average leaves earth at 10 microns, which equates with 15C, or 288K. 15 microns equates with subzero temperatures that can be found at the poles – so heat capture of c02 in the atmosphere is a rather rare event, and is fixed at around 4-6% of atmospheric thermal energy, achieved by the 1st 100ppm where its absorbtion window closes – well outside of normal temperatures. Its true that a c02 molecule’s stretching mode would allow it to transfer energy to other atmospheric molecules, such as the ghg water vapour, but this requires so much energy that it doesn’t occur even at 300K, with the c02 absorbtion bands, and there’s some 3,000 other mlecules apart from c02 in a given volume of air, making collisions between thermally excited c02 molecules very unlikely. Molecules of like kind are more efficient at transferring energy to one another. In the absence of such, thermal degradation takes place very quickly. (a billionth of a second), so vibrationally excited c02 thermalises very quickly with oxygen and nitrogen

the only way that global warming via the atmosphere could be justified would be by Boyle’s law, or the ideal gas law. However, temperature change through air pressure depends on a closed system – if the atmosphere gains more density it expands, than increasing partial pressure – the so called Iris effect. Given the limited spectroscopic bands of c02 on the other hand, an argument can’t be developed for c02 increasing the temperature or retaining heat. In the mid to upper troposphere where it goes to from -20-45C, or 228K, that does coincide with heat absorbtion from c02. However, there is no physical mechanism by which such mid tropospheric subzero temperatures can send heat back to earth, as temperature falls with altitude. (The notion violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics)

Since climatologists know that oceans and the sun heat the atmosphere, why did they put the focus on c02, not all c02 but the anthropogenic fraction? Because c02 goes after people, and guilt can generate a lot of profit for some. When the UN decided to go after people for the sake of carbon trading and taxes, it a form of totalitarian overwhelm, which is indeed very hard, and demodé to resist or question.

ITG ((17:10:48), suppose you show how suppressing the convective turbulence that is responsible for ~50% of the thermal translocation from the lower atmosphere still allows GCMs to make reliable predictions about CO2 induced climate warming. Not to mention the inability of GCMs to model clouds. Or to properly model (curve fit, actually) both temperature and precipitation at the same time.

Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis at National Technical University of Athens, colleagues of Demetris Koutsoyiannis, have written a nice walk-through of climate models and the whole AGW credibility issue here: http://www.hk-climate.org/

Take a look, Mr. Gazelle, and then let us all know where they go wrong, scientifically.

Interesting view Mosh. You might be interested to note that of the $4M in EU taxpayer funds granted to TERI, a portion went to the Met Office – also to study impacts of glacier loss in India. I would imagine the Euros might want their money back. As will many others.

The pattern appears to be science fronts accept huge government grants (taxpayer dollars) and then wash it down through additional fronts. Pachauri is in bed with so many organizations investigating his deeds could take years.

“The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.”

Dodgy Geezer (15:50:40) : “What this shows is that humanity in general is a sucker for this kind of mass movement. Charles Mackay’s book on Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds should be a set text in all classrooms….”

He was very pro post normal science. His objectives were: To trade truth for influence. To make climate science post-normal (source: small dead animals website, article: post normal science) 2007.

Then he seemed to change his mind and maybe could see something coming:

“Hulme believes that this dependence of politics on science expects too much of science’s ability to explain and to predict, and that this is a burden that science cannot carry. Science is exposing its vulnerabilities, he says. And in overselling itself, the risks are very substantial.”

and “To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgments is undermining both politics and science” “time to ditch climate consensus” Hulme May 2009.

Then came climategate: Headline: the IPCC is over says UEA climate scientist (Hulme)
He was quick to bury the IPCC.

..is the heat absorbtion of c02 in the atmosphere. It absorbs radiation at 13.7-16.3 microns with a peak of 15 microns – yet radiation on average leaves earth at 10 microns, which equates with 15C, or 288K. 15 microns equates with subzero temperatures that can be found at the poles – so heat capture of c02 in the atmosphere is a rather rare event..

It would be amazing if science had missed this point, but actually the 2nd half of your statement is not correct.

The radiation from a black body at a given temperature is a spectrum of wavelengths.

So when a 288K (15’C) body radiates heat, the peak wavelength is around 10um.
Radiation emitted between 14-16um is actually 72% of the radiation between 9-11um. As one example.

Its not even the errors in the science that burn me up, its the misleading manner in which even the good science is presented:

1. At the current rate of CO2 increase – sorry, that’s as silly as suggesting that the temperature went up 1 degree yesterday, and 2 today, so at the current rate of increase it will go up 4 tomorrow and 8 the day after. There isn’t enough oil production capacity to support that, and we’d run out of oil in a few years if there was.

2. There could be a tipping point – The amount of energy it takes to increase temperature rises exponentially as temperature rises. Tipping points etc are nonsense as a consequence unless you have an incredible amount of energy at your disposal, enought to boil the oceans.

3. CO2 doubling could add another 3.7 w/m2 to earth’s energy input – EVEN if this were true, it leaves the impression that energy input rises linearly with CO2 concentration. If that were true, you could add enough CO2 to put more energy in than what was coming out and invent perpetual motion. Additional CO2 effects diminish as concentration rises. Keep that in mind as you read 1 and 2 over again.

4. Water vapour rises exponentially with temperature and is also a greenhouse gas – yes it does and it is. Forgot to mention that law of diminishing returns thing again, or are we still fixated on perpetual motion?

5. The temperature has gone up about 0.6 degrees since the start of the industrial age 90 years ago – Also suspect, but even if true, its about the same as the temperature change in the 90 years before the industrial age. Funny how they lop that part of the graph off in all the presentations.

…I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion.

It’s now time for all scientists to take a stance. Either they continue to back the IPCC and stand behind all its findings, or they state in no uncertain terms the IPCC is at least scientifically corrupt and it must be discredited outright and disbanded. Those that remain silent will be assumed to be in the former camp, and they must know this and take whatever consequences that will arise as the Climategate continues to grow.

I certainly think Georg Kaser has justification for saying he will no longer serve as a Lead Author, after Lal denied receiving the letter Kaser sent him. (I hope a journalist asks Kaser for a fax of that letter And then posts it online.) And I think Kaser’s friends should make similar statements.

I hope this Lal-letter issue isn’t allowed to die but pursued, because Lal’s denial, if proven false, is potentially fatal to the IPCC.

p.s. maybe Mosher, or Watts, or any of you cowboys here for that matter, would care to tell us how the labyrinthine conspiracy you so meticulously “document” affects the radiative forcing properties of greenhouse gases. Fire at will.

Well Boss, assumin’ us here cowpokes wanted or needed to be obligin’ you somehows, Then, Inspector Sir, do you have a real greenhouse in which we could presumeably find these so called “greenhouse gases”, so as to narrow down the search to their natural habitat?

@ Inspector Thompon’s Gazelle – I’m afraid there’s nothing I could say that could possibly arouse you from your stupor. Instead, perhaps I could throw you a compliment for the sake of our poor planet: May your bicycle never puncture, may your cabbages never be rotten, and may your vegan lifestyle bear no polluting offspring.

[Anthony/Mods: I apologize if this is a duplicate … usually my posts make it to – and quickly past – moderation. But this time, for some reason, it disappeared into the ether and I didn’t Ctrl+A Ctrl+C before hitting submit …. arrrrgh …. herewith my reconstruction, using Firefox since obviously MSIE cannot be trusted! hro]

kwik (14:48:58) [responding to Dave Andrews (14:11:10)] wrote:

“Dave, it might be that Hulme is a nice guy, I dont know him.

“But look at 6:44 minutes out in this video here […]”

I’m still a relative newbie to the “climate wars”, having arrived on the scene a mere two weeks BC [Before Climategate], and this excellent series of Lindzen videos was among the first that I had looked at during my voyage of discovery.

In particular the frames to which kwik draws our attention: My mind was completely boggled, so that while they’ve been very much a part of my consciousness, because I did not know the key actors at that time, the connection to Hulme had escaped me … until now!

It was my thoughts on the E-mail from Hulme and Alcamo soliciting “consensus” in their co-authored “ATTENTION: Invitation to influence Kyoto” – along with Hulme’s Dec. 2 OpEd in the WSJ – that led to the birth of my quiet little corner of the blogosphere [http://hro001.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/the-fog-of-uncertainty-and-the-precautionary-principle/]

As an aside, Canada’s National Post even published a (somewhat abbreviated and slightly mangled version of my) letter to the editor in which I had corrected Terence Corcoran’s benevolent depiction of Hulme in his otherwise excellent two-part series on Climategate (Dec. 19/21). But I digress …

A few days ago, after reading the same Hulme text Steve Mosher cited in this post, I started mousing around on Hulme’s own site. Interestingly, in light of Mosher’s unearthing of the Pachauri connection, a search on “Pachauri” yields zilch.

“[…] I was a Convening Lead Author for the scenarios chapter for the IPCC Third Assessment Report, as well as a Lead Author and Review Editor for other chapters. I was also the Manager of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre between 1997 and 2002. I was a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1982 to 2002.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the “scenarios chapter” in TAR have been based on the SRES in which Castles & Henderson had found so many flaws (and whose critique, in true IPCC fashion, was dismissed)?

Two other tidbits I fouund on this page:

“I am a signatory to the Oxford Declaration ‘Science and faith unite on biodiversity’ under the auspicies of the James Martin Institute, issued 7 December 2007.”

And – under the heading of Personal Interests – “I am an evangelical Christian and member of the Church of England, and my theology is broadly aligned with that espoused by Fulcrum, a movement seeking to act as a point of balance within the Anglican Church.”

Just as a search of Hulme’s site on “Pachauri” leads to zilch, the site to which “Fulcrum” is linked also yields zilch on a search for Hulme. However, searching on Fulcrum for “climate change” is – not unlike searching for “IPCC” on Hulme’s – considerably more fruitful (one might even surmise that Hulme’s fruitful thoughts had gone forth and multiplied!).

A shorter version of this article was published as “How to make God’s promise good”, in The Church Times, 13 July 2007 and is republished with permission.

[opening header & paragraph:]

“Global warming is changing more than the climate

“The climate is changing, and there is now a very high confidence by an overwhelming majority of scientists that human activity is a significant part of that change. The global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased markedly since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values. Much of this is due to fossil fuel use, changes in land use, and agriculture.”

I demonstrate conclusively that the scientific community knew about these Glaciergate errors by their being exposed in a peer-reviewed journal in 2005, which was essentially the substance of a chapter from a book published in 2004 by an authority on the Himalayas. Syed Hasnain’s pronouncements are shown to be myths, and worse. The paper appeared in Himalayan Journal of Sciences, entitled

“Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.”

In light of that, I find it almost certain that Pachauri and a lot of others knew that these were lies years before AR4 was published.

Thanks. It’s important to keep the focus on the key question, “What did the IPCC know and when did it know it?” (I hope any Woodward and Bernsteins in the media who are following this will take the hint.) Therefore think it’s worth including a key excerpt from the link above:

This whole paper is well worth a read. It is a devastating exposure.

Some current myths on a Himalayan scale
…the following examples are offered because the degree of misinformation appears to be both extensive, widespread, and continuing…Reporting on global warming, the world economy, international terrorism, or almost any disaster has become comparable to the campaign speeches politicians tend to make at election time. It has also been understood for several decades now that ‘green’ movements have felt compelled to exaggerate in order to compete for attention with the possible bias of well-financed campaigns of big business and industry. Regardless, the examples of ‘latter-day myths’ are set forth because their pervasiveness tends to clutter the sustainable development landscape and perpetuate the Himalayan scale of uncertainty…

…The Times of London (21 July 2003), reporting on an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham, noted that ‘Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 40 years because of global warming . . . 500 million people in countries like India could also be at increased risk of drought and starvation.’ Syed Hasnain is quoted as affirming that ‘the glaciers of the region [Central Indian Himalaya] could be gone by 2035’.

According to Barry (1992: 45) the average temperature decrease with height (environmental lapse rate) is about 6ºC/km in the free atmosphere. The dry adiabatic lapse rate (DALR) is 9.8ºC/km. If it is assumed that the equilibrium line altitude (comparable with the ‘snow line’) in the Central Himalaya is about 5,000 masl and it will need to rise above 7,000 m if all the glaciers are to be eliminated, then the mean temperature increase needed to effect this change would be about 12–18ºC. Given that degree of global warming, summers in Calcutta would be a little uncomfortable.
As indicated earlier, myths tend to be self-perpetuating. In practice their longevity is often encouraged by vested interests of one form or another.

This, by one of the most well-known experts in the field, is a direct attack on the lies being propagated, and the prostitution and corruption of science in “the service of media, politics and the development agencies”. It is simply not possible after 2004 to suggest that the UN and those studying the Himalayas were unaware of the exposure of the myth and scam by such a prominent person as Jack Ives. Moreover, WWF were fully cognizant of Ives and his works – after all, in 2005 they quoted from four of his works in their paper.

…I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion

I just realized my own statement may be incorrect as there could be an alternative explanation. It is also possible that the science was presented in a misleading fashion because the presenters didn’t understand it and so made mistakes.

davidmhoffer: You are aware that both emissions, and atmospheric [CO2], are both accelerating, right? There is more than enough C in fossil fuels and vegetation, never mind the oceans, to send the [CO2] well over 1000 ppm. And boiling the oceans would not be an example of a tipping point david, but rather of blunt force annihilation. Tipping points involve a degree of surprise, or at least unexpectedly quick change.

But at least you all gave it a shot and +/- addressed the science, which is more than I can say for a couple of others.

Those who’ve resorted to chicanery in order to create facts to fit to the thesis are guilty of a common human tendency. We invest a great deal of emotion/commitment in our beliefs – though there may be little in the way of supporting grounds – and we don’t like letting go of them even when counter evidence starts to come in, and those amongst us who are less scrupulous can be tempted to attempt to make reality fit the theory instead of the reverse. There’s also the crowd/herd instinct at work. The majority of humans like to stay with the bigger pack. It takes courage and ruthlessness to stand alone against a tide of differing opinion/theory and those qualities don’t come together in more than a small percentage of humans. Hence the number of scientists adhering to a theory that seems to me to be lacking substantial support in terms of evidence and logic.

Well said!

Dodgy Geezer:

What this shows is that humanity in general is a sucker for this kind of mass movement. Charles Mackay’s book on Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds should be a set text in all classrooms…

‘Professor Beddington said that uncertainty about some aspects of climate science should not be used as an excuse for inaction: “Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only 90 per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that had a 10 per cent chance of crashing?” ‘

What is it about climate science that makes an idiot of so many people? Everything he says about uncertainty is sensible but then he goes on to indicate that he believes that the IPCC estimate of P=0.9 is meaningful. What does he think the evidence for this could be? 9 observations supporting CAGW and 1 refuting it? (Of course, there’s no evidence, they just made it up.)

Distribution for Endorsements —
I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as
possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is
numbers. The media is going to say “1000 scientists signed” or “1500
signed”. No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000
without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a
different story.

Conclusion — Forget the screening, forget asking
them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those
names!

Timing — I feel strongly that the week of 24 November is too late.
1. We wanted to announce the Statement in the period when there was
a sag in related news, but in the week before Kyoto we should expect
that we will have to crowd out many other articles about climate.
2. If the Statement comes out just a few days before Kyoto I am
afraid that the delegates who we want to influence will not have any
time to pay attention to it. We should give them a few weeks to hear
about it.
3. If Greenpeace is having an event the week before, we should have
it a week before them so that they and other NGOs can further spread
the word about the Statement. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so
bad to release the Statement in the same week, but on a
diffeent day. The media might enjoy hearing the message from two
very different directions.

Conclusion — I suggest the week of 10 November, or the week of 17
November at the latest.

Mike — I have no organized email list that could begin to compete
with the list you can get from the Dutch. But I am still
willing to send you what I have, if you wish.

” By davidmhoffer on January 26, 2010 at 6:43 p: …I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion.”

David, yes indeed. Why would they act the way they did if their position was strongly supported by the whole spectrum of significant science studies? There would be no need for their questionable behavior.

So was it because the wanted the whole research fund market to themselves? Was it really the money? I don’t think it was money primarily. Something deeper. Hmmmm.

Yes the elite Climate Scientist, enc., were/are always trying to out run the pursuit, to “move beyond” and never stand still long enough to be successfully pinned down by real Science and rational thought.

Of course they use other anti-rational tactics as well, almost all of them except for brute force. But that too was eventually going to come if they weren’t stopped by the whole social-political process first, which they almost certainly will be, at least for a time.

Here’s an important post by KLR, quoting a post from Romm’s site (by Romm?) that was just put up on a thread that’s gone cold, the “BREAKING NEWS” thread. It’s important because of what it might portend, as I comment at the end:

Lal’s phone number is easy to find online, and I called him myself, even though it was after midnight in India (I hoped he was on travel), but he answered it immediately.

He said these were “the most vilest allegations” and denied that he ever made such assertions. He said “I didn’t put it [the 2035 claim] in to impress policymakers…. We reported the facts about science as we knew them and as was available in the literature.”

He told me:

Our role was to bring out the factual science. The fact is the IPCC has been very conservative.

He’ll be in hot water if the Daily Mail’s David Rose taped his interview with him. If Rose can prove Lal wrong, then it’ll be hard to believe Lal’s claim that he didn’t receive Kaser’s warning about the absurdity of the IPCC’s melted-by-2035 statement.

My guess, if Rose has got him on tape, is that Lal will then spin it by saying that impressing policymakers was only a secondary consideration — hardly worth mentioning, really.

…I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion

I just realized my own statement may be incorrect as there could be an alternative explanation. It is also possible that the science was presented in a misleading fashion because the presenters didn’t understand it and so made mistakes.

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with its non-existent “greenhouse CO2″ fixation is a tissue of lies, a Green Gang scheme to manipulate cap-and-trade Thieves’ Markets for personal benefit at the expense of post-Enlightenment industrial civilization.

As Climate Cultists’ self-evident propaganda organ, Pachauri’s IPCC should be abolished forthwith, its glowering Statist thuggery extirpated root-and-branch. Politicians from Gordon Brown to Kevin Rudd to the ineffable Obama Banana are constitutionally incapable of objective, rational evaluations, so what difference would it make? On ‘tother hand, if need exists for such a clearinghouse, Ban Ki-moon in all humility should invite Hans von Storch to do the honors.

Meantime, “Casey Jones” Pachauri is on a fast-track to oblivion– “Coming ’round the bend doing ninety miles an hour, his whistle broke into a scream”. What is railroad engineer Rajendra’s “understanding that climate-change (sic) is a North – South issue” if not a ploy to extort literally trillions of U.S. dollars from global energy economies in furtherance of his Luddite sociopaths’ New World Order wrecking-ball? Warmists’ stupid theses are not only mathematically and physically impossible (see Edward Lorenz’s Chaos Theory [1964] in context of thermodynamic Conservation Laws), but as Cycle 24’s “dead sun” presages a 70-year Maunder Minimum shading to renewed Ice Time, endangered global populations had better seek self-protection NOW.

You bet I would Anand. It’s happened many times in the past, as the ice core record shows pretty well. Delta T can be forced by a wide variety of factors, as the IPCC reports and scientific literature in general, are quite clear about.

J. Peden: Then why is the earth’s temperature not what you get from a simple Stefan-Boltzman calculation, i.e. basically frozen everywhere? As for terms, what is it about “greenhouse” you don’t get?

O/T but Bishops Hill is reporting the Times article saying “The UK government’s chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, is the latest rat to flee the sinking ship Climatology, with an interview in the Times in which he comes out of the closet”

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with its non-existent “greenhouse CO2″ fixation is a tissue of lies, a Green Gang scheme to manipulate cap-and-trade Thieves’ Markets for personal benefit at the expense of post-Enlightenment industrial civilization.

You don’t understand why rationale people don’t take seriously those who make such statements, do you? Is this your idea of a scientific rebuttal to climate change science?

Objectively speaking a lot of house cleaning is needed at IPCC. If they want any sembelance of believability they need all new blood at the top and ones with level heads that recognise transparency and truth need to replace hype and bull. . .

I think not. As Paul (14:59:04) says,

The IPCC is but one of the first ripples. This is a big pond and there are lots more ripples that have not yet been noticed or commented on. . .

However, the IPCC is the also the fountainhead of the pond, the reference point or source which consolidates the ‘global warming’/’climate change’ mythology, concentrates it, and spews it into “the big pond.”

So simply “house cleaning” or reforming the IPCC will not stop this insidious, ever-growing cycle. It’s got to be taken down, torn apart, and destroyed.

Here’s a first step: Senator Inhofe and others in the US Congress, as well as supporters of scientific realism in other Western parliaments, should introduce legislation to defund any UN contributions that go toward the IPCC. This will have little immediate effect, given the “true believers” at the heart of the Western governments, but it will put them on notice that the tide is turning, and it will help mobilize public anger against the IPCC, the UN, and the whole AGW movement. And this in turn will influence elections.

We have a long ways to go, but let’s hope the assiduous labors of Watts, Mosher, McIntyre, Lindzen, and many others will keep revealing more and more of the sewage spewing forth from the IPCC fountain, and the stench will bring about a public outcry to demolish the damned thing.

Despite all of this stuff there is still a central thesis which may yet turn out to be correct
***************************************************
Yes, it MAY turn out to be correct. But…the revelations so far indicate that there is no more reason to believe in AGW than there is to believe in Creationism or even the Tooth Fairy.

It seems that all of the “science” that proved AGW is a hoax. If anyone can show a peer reviewed study that is not corrupt I would welcome the opportunity to consider it.

I guess that is a challenge to all: Can ANYONE find a peer reviewed study “proving” AGW that ISN’T suspect???

John Blake (20:34:12) :as Cycle 24’s “dead sun” presages a 70-year Maunder Minimum shading to renewed Ice Time
There are no solid indications that a Maunder Minimum type lull is coming, and there are no solid evidence that the Maunder Minimum was the cause of the Little Ice Age. Let us not dilute our skepticism by offering up equally shaky ‘science’.

{[Response: The logarithmic relationship is between CO2 concentrations and the forcing and it is something that has been known for decades (if not back to the 19th Century). The dependence arises because of the way that the absorption near the peak spectral line changes as CO2 changes. The consequence is that the forcing for each successive doubling is roughly the same at least up to around 1000ppm, and down to maybe 50 (?) ppm. For much smaller amounts the relationship is linear. – gavin]}

If I take the average 3.7 w/m2 for every doubling of CO2 and use Gavin’s 50ppm as a starting point double to 100, then double to 200 then double to 400, about where we are today, I would get around 11.1 W/m2 increase, correct? Does this not equal about 10*C in higher temps?

Inspector, you seem so confident. The Stefan-Boltzmann equations and black body radiation have been thoroughly discussed on this blog countless times. Read more posts, and you will see that everyone can post on this site no matter their level of understanding. But rest assured there are many who post here that would give you a full barrage of credible debate regarding the false theory of Co2 driven climate. It is important that anyone can participate and learn, unless you would prefer that people did not research and decide for themselves what is happening. Shouldn’t people be able to decide for themselves?

davidmhoffer: You are aware that both emissions, and atmospheric [CO2], are both accelerating, right?

Gazelle, when you are surprised by a lion, you jump to your feet and start running. In the first few seconds you think, WOW! I accelerated to 20 mph in just the first 4 seconds, in eight seconds I’ll have accelerated to 40 mph and in a couple of hours I will be going the speed of light, that effing lion will never catch me. Stupid Gazelle, nothing can accelerate forever. It is physicaly impossible for either emissions or CO2 to accelerate forever. You may be thinking that you pulled away from that lion like crazy at first, but you have a top speed and so does the lion. He may not accelerate as fast as you, but if his top speed is higher than yours, he will catch you eventually. Fossil fuel production may not have hit top speed yet, but we’re pretty close and the oil is getting harder to find. When the planet heats up, the amount of energy it radiates actually does accelerate which eventually cools the planet. It doesn’t accelerate as fast at first, but it has a way higher top speed. That’s the lion.

But let’s assume Mr Gazelle that I am wrong and you are right. The earth radiates hundreds of watts per square meter. All except 40 are already captured by existing greenhouse gases. So if CO2 doubles and grabs an extra 3.7 watts, we’re down to 36.3. Water vapour has a positive feedback and grabs another 7.4. We’re down to 28.7. Heck, lets double it again, no TRIPLE, we’re ACCELERATING for gosh sakes! 11.1 watts for co2 and 22.2 for water vapour, we’re at -5 watts left. Hey we’re capturing more energy than the earth is radiating now! Who needs oil when you’ve got free energy!?

So, Mr Gazelle, not only do you want me to believe that you can outrun the lion based on the first four seconds of the chase, you also want me to believe that the brick wall you are running toward will get farther away that faster you run. There’s a maximum 40 watts… I mean miles between you and the wall. When you get there, you’re there, no matter how fast you accelerated all the way, you’ve used up all the space you had. And the lion? He’s actually governed by a different set of rules. He can radiate … I mean run WAY past the wall, even though you can’t. It may not seem fair, its just the way it is.

Thanks for Anthony and all the regular’s who caught the typo’s. No excuses, let me just say that it was the fastest 3000 words I ever wrote. And if people have not read Bishop Hill they need to get their butts over there.

I would get around 11.1 W/m2 increase, correct? Does this not equal about 10*C in higher temps

No it doesn’t. The amount of power (watts/m2) to cause a 1 degree increase in temperature increases with the temperature in degrees K raised to power of four. So, if it’s 0 degrees C, or 273 K, you need 4.7 watts/m2 to do go up by one degree. To increase by 10 you would need 49.5 watts. If you started at say 30 C though, you would need 6.4 watts for one degree and 67.3 for 10 degrees.

Further, the more energy gets taken up by CO2, the less there is left for the next doubling. So the amount of energy required to go up one degree keeps on rising and the amount of energy left to capture by doubling CO2 keeps falling.

Then why is the earth’s temperature not what you get from a simple Stefan-Boltzman calculation, i.e. basically frozen everywhere? As for terms, what is it about “greenhouse” you don’t get

No one said that greenhouse effect didn’t exist. It does, which is why the planet sits about 288 K instead of 30 degrees or so less. That doesn’t mean that any specific increase in greenhouse gases will give the effect that some people are claiming it will. I can prove that gravity doesn’t work by throwing a ball up in the air, provided that I close the curtain’s so you don’t see what happens after it hits the peak of its trajectory. Just because you didn’t see it hit the peak and come back down doesn’t mean it didn’t. No one is saying gravity doesn’t work, we’re just saying we can figure out how high the ball will actually go depending on how hard we throw it, and others are insiting it will got many times as high, higher than we are physicaly able to throw it in fact.

Richard Drake (14:22:33) :
Steve, this is an enormously helpful narrative, a seedbed as some of us try to get our heads around what we should submit to the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into CRU and Climategate.

Richard, truth be told I am struggling to get my head wrapped around what I will submit to the house of commons. I believe I am just going to focus on one issue. The issue where I have standing WRT a pair of FOIA I have pending ( havent told anybody what they are about yet) Anyway, last night I needed to distract myself from that brain buster. So I did this. It really is a tough story to tell. The good Bishop has mad skills when it comes to narrative so I can’t wait to read how he expands his Jesus paper story with the facts from the mails. That is a whole book in itself.

1. I’m a computer guy.
2. For me a “hack” describes many things. A ugly kludge to make a system
work, or an trick devised to make the system operate against its own principles. You set up rules, I’ll look for a way to hack those rules.
3. In the climategate debate the term hacker is “owned” by the other side.
i want to pwn that word. So everytime you see them use the word “hacker”
pwn it and tell them who the REAL HACKERS ARE. link them to this article and jack the thread.

I’m not sure if I was too hard on Hulme. he does redeem himself, as I noted, in his moment of clarity. We will see. Perhaps he can explain himself. In my mind there is always room for redemption. After time in the penalty box.

Methinks Senator Inhofe is going to have a lot more help on his side of the fence come election time this fall. It has dawned on the electorate that we have been had by the warmers, the U.N., and it’s I.P.C.C. spawn. Enough precious time and money has been wasted on this AGW hoax, and we don’t have any more to waste, unless we want to watch millions starve in the near future.

jack morrow (15:39:53) :
Half way through your book-love it. I really liked and smiled alot over page 31. “Jones has no such option. He is his science. The same goes for Mann. He is his hockey stick”.

Thanks, I really have to thank some people on the other side for this. A while back, both at Lucia’s blog and at a blog by a persona named Susanna, I started down the path of just trying ( for devils advocate sake) to argue why
A proud man is more dangerous than a shill. And how a man will work harder to protect his personal identity than a corporation will work to protect its corporate identity. As no one could mount a counter argument worth spit, I went with it. Now Pachauri illustrates this PERFECTLY.

here you have a man whom the AGWers woried about because of his political backing. Once he gets inside, the shill for Bush becomes a shill for TERI. people who work for money can be flipped. A corporation, like Shell, can also be flipped. profit from OIL, or profit from renewables, in the end, they will switch identity. But a man who’s whole reputation, who’s whole professional identity rests on his science being right.. he cannot change.
That’s why, Jones says in his mail to Christy that he hopes that nothing will be done about climate change.. that way his science can be proved right.

John Cepican (15:41:56) :
“Mr. Mosher: This ismy first comment submission anywhere. To date I have been a reader only. I concur with most of what you have said. However, I take strong objection to your characterization of the Soon and Baliunas paper.”

Granted. That was a tough call for me. I might substitute the word “tenuous” to describe the paper. But then, I find most paleo work tenuous. In the larger scheme of things I dont think it matters. The issue is that you have an example of Von Storch who took what I think was the right action based on his belief. The chapter authors of galciergate and amazongate
would do well to follow his lead. The same goes for the guys who did chapter 6.

David Ball, do you have some type of learning disability? Who said anything about ” the equivalence of C and CO2″, or whether people had the right to think for themselves? As for Stefan-Boltzmann, a barrage?, yeah probably, but credible, no. Anyway, take it up with J Peden–he’s the one who claimed the earth is not a greenhouse, 150 years of research to the direct contrary notwithstanding.

davidmhoffer: Yes, someone did in fact claim the earth’s not a greenhouse, thus the response. The climate sensitivity, without long term feedbacks, is pretty confidently established at about 3C, from at least 1979.

Anand: yes up to 800 years in at least one case, maybe more. But no, on the MWP as a CO2 source. The stable isotope signature of the atmosphere, points directly to fossil fuel burning as the main cause of the CO2 rise since 1800. Plus the MWP was not a global phenomenon.

Dodgy Geezer (15:50:40) :
@John Whitman
“…Regarding the fundamental motivation of CAGW leaders & followers, I do not think it is money. ..The causitive motivation at root is some kind of hatred of . . . . something.”

Mosher’s article is not really quite on the ball – the IPCC hackers were never really hackers of an independent scientific organisation. They were, and remain, green activists. The way the IPCC was set up made it an obvious place for activists to work. If you weren’t a true believer, I guess you didn’t apply to work there.”

That’s a fair assessment. Tom Fuller has looking at how the activists have hijacked the science. So in one sense you are right. My feeble defense would be this. The system is set up to look like it is a fair process, but once the activist operators are in place it’s really not.

Davidmhoffer – thanx! this has been bugging me for a while! to me the whole shebang depends on this CO2 ability to heat the atmosphere.

your nice tie in to the amazon story from the ipcc regarding the forest turning into savanahh by using the lion/gazalle metaphor was just spot on! if you don’t mind, i am going to use that to help explain the CO2 forcing to my kids (18 and 16 LOL!). So nice when difficult science can be explained so succintly!

It’s like a movie, eh? More like a very long, drawn out TV series that “Jumped the Shark” in November 2009. ;) (For those going “What?” that’s a reference to the episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie jumped his motorcycle over a big tank of water with a shark in it. The general consensus is the quality of the show went screaming downhill without brakes after that episode.)

Or would it be “Nuked the Fridge”? NtF is from “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, wherein Jones miraculously survives an aboveground nuclear bomb test in Nevada by shutting himself inside a lead lined refrigerator, which then gets blown across the landscape for quite a ways. Jones then gets out of the fridge completely unharmed.

That was so extremely stupid it utterly ruined the movie. (The “magnetic” gunpowder and lead shot didn’t help one bit either!)

I’d say the information in the CRU documents and all the WWF and Greenpeace references in AR4 have absolutely Nuked the Fridge of AGW.

“Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (17:10:48) :
p.s. maybe Mosher, or Watts, or any of you cowboys here for that matter, would care to tell us how the labyrinthine conspiracy you so meticulously “document” affects the radiative forcing properties of greenhouse gases. Fire at will.”

As many here can tell you I am a LukeWarmer. That means I don’t deny radiative physics. heck I worked with Modtran and Hitran ages ago ( source code even, very cool) . So adding GHGs to the atmosphere will increase the temperature, all other things being equal. How much? I dunno. lets start by looking at the BEST evidence we have.

hmmm. Thermometers. They are the best proxy for temperature ( the kinetic energy of molecules) Lets look at the record. Hmm. what’s the index of record for the IPCC. Why that would be Hadcru. hadcru is a nice graph.
I like it. I used to make charts like that. let me write to Phil Jones and see if he will give me the raw data, his code for processing that, and the geostats he uses to come up with that nice graph.

Opps. 404. file not found.

I don’t engage In debates about GHGs and radiative physics. That bugs some people who want to convince me that Global warming is false.
But my position also bugs people who do believe in radiative physics. they think that just because I believe in the physics I am somehow commited to believing in data I am not allowed to see and code I am not allowed to see.

I’m sorry I wont move off this point until it is settled. Warmer? sure.
How much? cant say.
So asking me to even debate the “why” is a silliness I choose not to engage in.

This is so totally off topic I’m not sure where to post it. However, since deep science is an interest of yours and it does deal with emission/absorption lines and their frequency and probability of emission (topics in climate science) I thought you might want to have a look.

Leif Svalgaard (13:43:34) :
All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use.
This should be the case not only for data but also for the published papers. Often it takes the papers to make sense of the data or to see how the data is used. Therefore the papers should also be accessible to everyone without a ‘pay-wall’. Finally, the reviews [or at least, the reviewers’ identity] should be part of the electronic version of the paper. One could argue that some fields and/or obscure journals might be exempt [for various reasons, e.g. economic], but Journals with high impact factor should be open.”

Thx dr. S.

A while back I suggested to Dr. Curry that journals require that papers have reproducible results. basically you have to submit your paper ( the advertisement of the science) your data and your code. If the junk wont produce the charts and tables used in the paper– trash bin. She wasnt too keen on that idea, but thought it a good suggestion for the IPCC.
Also ditto on the reviewers identity. In my background I always knew who was busting my chops. its part of the job. Crap, you WANT harsh critics.

I especially like the arguments about the allowances for non peer reviewed literature. These arguments show an utter lack of understanding of the mind set of those writing CH 6. But first let’s start with an analysis of the actual annex 2. why is the exception created? let’s see what they say..

“Because it is increasingly apparent that materials relevant to IPCC Reports, in particular, information about the
experience and practice of the private sector in mitigation and adaptation activities, are found in sources that
have not been published or peer-reviewed (e.g., industry journals, internal organisational publications, non-peer
reviewed reports or working papers of research institutions, proceedings of workshops etc) the following
additional procedures are provided.”

the first thing to note about the exception is that it is targeted or motivated by issues that come up in WGII and WGIII. I’m refering to WGI, which is the SCIENCE working group. Second, the exception indicates that the publications in this area are not peer reviewed. It’s a different case in WGI where the norm, where the gold standard is peer review.

So, besides the fact that the exception was carved out for a different WG, you only have to look at the mails to see what the mindset of the the WGI AR4 Ch06 writers and reviewers were.

Which mail would you like to see? The mails were they talk about rejecting papers because they contain references to personal communication?
the mails were they are scrambling to get stuff into journals?
The mails were they argue that they should refute papers in peer reviewed journals so that they can be used? Seems to me, if you read the mails, that they took the guidelines pretty damn seriously. heck it looks like they broke the law to cover up what they did. Why not just say ” hey briffa, that paper by ammann, dont worry about the IPCC deadlines, dont worry annex 2 is our friend.” nope you wont find them saying that. Why? Cause they are WGI
and peer review rules supreme. At Least in their minds.

Still you have an interesting hack there.

1. promote the IPCC report on the basis that it only uses peer review.
2. trash people who publish in non peer reviewed literature.
3. Stuff a little exception clause away, just in case.

When you get busted, whip out #3 and hope to god people dont remember that you sold them the product on #1.

If the “Science is settled” why is the IPCC having to withdraw various reports that constitute (albeit small) parts of that settled science? By admitting to these individual oversights are they not admitting, by extension, that the science is not settled, notwithstanding their massive expertise in climate science. Or are we to understand the “Science is settled” as special climate scientist use of English, like ‘trick’, or ‘hide the decline’ which means one thing to poorly informed citizens but quite another to the priesthood of climate science?

I don’t know if it’s courage or stupid ignorance when someone comes on to this forum obviously lacking knowledge. I hope the good mods bear with me.

Gazelle, go to the IPCC web site and download the paper IPCC Expert Meeting on the Science of Alternative Metrics
The Grand Hotel, Oslo, Norway
18-20 March 2009

In that paper you will see that the MAIN OBJECTIVE of the AGW movement is for the UN to control not just CO2 but ALL human emissions.
The paper discusses changing the current metric from Global Warming Potential (GWP) {which uses radiative forcing} to Global Temperature change Potential (GTP){which uses T targets within any given timeframes}

This may possibly explain why Copenhagen ended with Obama announcing a target of 1.5-2degC

(are you happy with the UN taking control of all emissions on this planet?)

Read the report. You may decide to change your comment about “rationale” people and the “science” of CC

There was nothing “small” about the Himalayan Glacier fraud. It purported to adversely affect 16% of the worlds population within a relatively short period of time (2035). This was in effect the poster child of the IPCC alarmism. Just like it’s predecessor poster child, the Mann Hockey Stick, it’s been shown to be a fraud.
NOT (albeit small)

steven mosher (23:27:28) :
So adding GHGs to the atmosphere will increase the temperature, all other things being equal.

Few of us are able to understand Miscolczi’s math, but no-one has yet refuted him as far as I know. He says the greenhouse is saturated, and increases in co2 will be offset by changes in humidity. Since water vapour is so much more powerful as a GHG than co2, humidity wouldn’t have to change much, and so the change wouldn’t be easily detectable.

I suspect the reason Miscolczi’s NASA boss logged on to Miscolczi’s computer and withdrew his paper from JGR, forcing Miscolczi’s resignation, is that NASA knows he is right, and doesn’t want the paper cited or debated.

“The climate sensitivity, without long term feedbacks, is pretty confidently established at about 3C, from at least 1979.”

Reference please!

“Plus the MWP was not a global phenomenon.”

Oh yes, the old “the MWP was not a global phenomenon” argument. Funny then, that there are hundreds of papers published over several decades that identify a warm period in every Continent of the Earth. That really is the scientific consensus.

Or do you actually imagine that somehow there was this warm anomoly sitting over Europe that lasted hundreds of years? How is that supposed to happen? There is no physical mechanism that could prevent equilibrium from occuring. The only reason there are those peddling this nonsense is because it fits their man made warming theories, otherwise it would have been smothered at birth.

Steve Mosher, Sir: I read the article with complete absorption, once I ‘clicked’ with your use of the word ‘hacker’. All of us who seek enlightenment in this scandal owe you a huge debt and a big thanks! The guys wearing the black hats will get theirs as You, Anthony and a host of others have started gaing momentum in making the fraud totally cleare to all who can read and listen!
Prof Hulme is in very odd company judging by the Bishop of Thetford’s little article about climate. I was indoctrinated in Christianity as a young chorister and the Bish reminds me of why I gave up on it after I found that loving the music wasn’t enough. However, I still love Mozart’s religious works and regard them as some of the loveliest music ever written.

Just finished CRU Tape Letters – read it in two evenings – couldn’t put it down. Awesome. I found myself reading sections of it again last night; this Climate stuff has me obsessed as I am new to it (couple of weeks BC…little interest…CG growing interest…a bit of web research -> obsession!!). I’m just a humble Mechanical Engineer and not a scientist but I certainly can understand the basics and am astounded the AGW crowd got as far as it did and most disturbing to me is how such a load of bad policy initiatives were/are based on the faulty science. The mainstream media has a lot to answer for. Take Scientific American and Newsweek as examples. They have been not just going along for the ride but amplifying the message. Sad for them that this is a huge breaking story and they are laming-out in a most shameful manner. The Wall Street Journal is the only one making hay on this. I write letters to the editor that are ignored; I have written all my elected officials including President Obama; I tell everyone I know about this. The word needs to get out to stop more damage from AGW foolishness.

My learning disability causes me to question someone who clearly does not understand that rising Co2 will not cause runaway warming. It seems to me that the biosphere has BENEFITED from the increase in Co2. Your hatred for humanity is showing.

“The radiation from a black body at a given temperature is a spectrum of wavelengths.”

Scientists already discovered before the AGW fashion that c02 absorbed around 4-8% of outfoing radiation, with a peak of 15m and shoulders of 2m wide. This streching and bending of its bonds is indeed blackbody radiation, such that doesn’t happen to nitrogen. In temperature terms, it makes no difference however. However, everything at some level on the Planck curve absorbs hear, even nitrogen. The important factor is that objects emit radiation according to their temperature. Earth emits an amount of radiation then air absorbs some of it to some degree.

The [IPCC] system is set up to look like it is a fair process, but once the activist operators are in place it’s really not.

And climate science is set up to look like science, but it too disproportionately attracted activists who saw it as a breakthrough science where they could leverage its findings to make a difference, along the lines of the campaigns against acid rain and CFCs. These activists got traction during the warm phase in the 80s and 90s and got into top teaching and editorial positions, where they lay down and defend their paradigm, and marginalize dissent.

Climatology thus has an embedded, “do-something” (activist) anti-anthro bias, like Women’s Studies, due to the type of people it attracts and the indoctrination they in turn mete out. It’s not a “science” like most other hard sciences. It’s more like psychology after it became dominated by behaviorists, or sociology dominated by social activists. And because it’s more an observational than an experimental science, it’s easier for partisans to avoid falsification. This recruitment bias explains much of the consensus in organized clime.

PS: I can’t prove the above, but a sociology grad student could do so by surveying students in three subjects — geology, climatology, and environmental studies — about their political and social attitudes. I bet the second group’s profile would look more like the third’s than the first’s.

GAZELLE:
davidmhoffer: Yes, someone did in fact claim the earth’s not a greenhouse, thus the response. >

The comment was a suggestion that references were being mixed. That said, the earth is not in fact a greenhouse. It has no cieling that blocks convection 100% at a given point, it has no walls that insulate it from the atmosphere beside it, nor wind currents that remove or add humidity to it. CO2 retains energy via one of several processes that warm a greenhouse. That does not make earth a greenhouse.

GAZELLE
The climate sensitivity, without long term feedbacks, is pretty confidently established at about 3C, from at least 1979.

Arguments without specific references are meaningless. I can prove that the moon landing was fake by showing that mosquitos exist. If they can’t get rid of mosquitos, how could they possibly get go to the moon? Your statement says climate sensitivity is established. By who? at about 3 C. based on what energy changes?

Leo G
your nice tie in to the amazon story from the ipcc regarding the forest turning into savanahh by using the lion/gazalle metaphor was just spot on! if you don’t mind, i am going to use that to help explain the CO2 forcing to my kids (18 and 16 LOL!). So nice when difficult science can be explained so succintly

Feel free to use as long as you keep in mind that it is a huge over simplification. One of my favourite quotes from Einstein is that “Complex difficult problems have simple, easy to understand, WRONG answers!” I was trying to make a specific point to Gazelle. For teen agers, I tend to relate it to cars:

Suppose you are on a road trip driving down the highway at 60 MPH. You notice you are almost out of gas. You might not make it to the next gas station. The obvious solution is to go faster so that you get there sooner, before you run out of gas.

Problem is, that wind resistance goes up with the square of the speed. So go 10% faster and wind resistance goes up 21%. Fuel economy goes down accordingly. The faster you go, the worse it gets. If you keep on accelerating, you will get to a point where the wind resistance rises to match the total horsepower of the engine, and it is now physicaly impossible to accelerate any more. If you accelerate slowly, wind resistance picks up slowly. If you floor it, wind resistance picks up quickly. The faster you go, the farther from the gas station you are when you run out.

Energy input to the planet is like gas feeding your engine. A certain amount gets you a certain speed. Earth’s radiance is like wind resistance. Except it goes up by power of 4, not 2. (Convert to Kelvin scale for that, not Celsius). So what ever speed you are going, the distance from the gas pedal to the floor is how much extra gas you can pump in. The total extra energy you have available from CO2 capture is like the distance between the gas pedal and the floor. Once its floored, there ain’t no more. And as anyone who has driven cars really fast knows, the increase in speed you get from the first half of the gas pedal is WAY less than the increase in speed you get from the last half. CO2 suffers from the exact same decline in effect at it increases in concentration.

Steven Mosher, if you don’t like the HadCRUT data, you are aware of the existence and essential similarity of of the NCDC GHCN and the NASA GISSTEMP data right? And that HadCRUT actually gives a warming rate that is more conservative (i.e. slightly LESS) than GISSTEMP?

I’m all for complete open-ness of data and methods, and maybe CRU really SHOULD have been more open with all theirs, and maybe they really DO need to reform their data policies. But to jump to conspiracy theories and presumptions about who meant what in email messages over the last decade, as “proof” of this or that intent, is simply foolish.

davidmhoffer:

J.Peden (20:29:35) says: “Earth is not a greenhouse, Inspector. ”
That’s your idea of an allusion to “mixed references”?. As for your contentions, the greenhouse comparison is called an ANALOGY david! Nobody’s claiming there are glass panes up in the sky keeping the heat in. The idea is that GHGs are operationally similar IN THEIR HEAT EFFECT, to a greenhouse.

Vincent: You need to read Mann et al, 2008 and Mann et al 2009, amongst others. The MWP was NOT global. And even if it were. so what? We know full well that other processes besides GHG forcing can warm the entire globe, so the denial of that fact proves nothing.

Uh oh, here come the diatribes against Mike Mann! From those who love to scream “ad hom” of course.

“My learning disability causes me to question someone who clearly does not understand that rising Co2 will not cause runaway warming. It seems to me that the biosphere has BENEFITED from the increase in Co2. Your hatred for humanity is showing.”

Really now? First, we weren’t talking about “runaway warming” (we could I suppose, but let’s try to follow one idea at a time). As for the benefits of CO2 increase–do you have expertise in that area? Or references to the literature regarding the balance of evidence of the positive vs negative effects of higher [CO2}?

Your hatred for evidence-based discourse, and ability to jump to foolish conclusions, is showing.

“But no, on the MWP as a CO2 source. The stable isotope signature of the atmosphere, points directly to fossil fuel burning as the main cause of the CO2 rise since 1800. Plus the MWP was not a global phenomenon.”

So if I make a statement of this sort below, how wrong would I be? I am here, assuming you would allow me latitude is saying that I cannot be completely wrong.

“A certain proportion of the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be attributable to the climatic conditions that prevailed approximately a millenium ago”.

I also note that you support your argument by negating the existance of a medieval warm period. Does that imply that you believe that Michael’s Mann’s hockey stick graph is an accurate representation of temperatures in the recent climatologic past?

J. Peden: Then why is the earth’s temperature not what you get from a simple Stefan-Boltzman calculation, i.e. basically frozen everywhere? As for terms, what is it about “greenhouse” you don’t get?

Well, Pilgrim, does the Stefan-Boltzman calculation work in that thar “greenhouse” you still won’t show me so’s I can find them “greenhouse gases”? I’ma takin’ your word for it, Pardner, that it might could not work very well thar neither and I don’t like to be a’led on one of them Wild Goose Chases very much. So, Pardner, thisin’ is youin’ last chancin’ for me. Whar’s that thar “greenhouse” you keep a-wantin’ me to find so’s I can see them gasses in their natural habitat, as god above apparently intended?

Inspector, I just had me an idea iffin’ y’all want to know more about them “greenhouse gasses” in their natural habitat, even iffin’ y’all still won’t show me their secret ‘ecosystem’, is what I think them scientists with thar scientific hats call ‘em. Why don’t y’all play with them gasses a little bit in that thar “greenhouse” an’ see what they-all do? You’ve got ‘em naturally trapped thar, don’t y’all?

Gazelle:
As for your contentions, the greenhouse comparison is called an ANALOGY david!>

Got it. When someone says its not a greenhouse, they are an idiot. When someoen explains WHY its not a greenhouse you change your tune and insist its just an analogy. In the face of every refutation of your argument, you just change what it was that you were claiming in the first place and then draw the same conclusion from it. Are you assembling a track record to accompany your job application to the IPCC?

There is a very good reason the alarmist crowd doesn’t want to talk about runaway global warming [or more specifically: CO2=CAGW, the hypothesis that is the basis for the entire scare]: there is no empirical evidence showing that an increase in that tiny trace gas will cause runaway global warming. That is the reason that the debate has devolved to red herring arguments, intended to take the spotlight off of that failed hypothesis.

As for the benefits of CO2 increase–do you have expertise in that area? Or references to the literature regarding the balance of evidence of the positive vs negative effects of higher [CO2}?

In the extremely small concentrations being discussed, carbon dioxide is entirely beneficial. It does not cause anything more than negligible warming, which can be entirely disregarded for all practical purposes, and it significantly enhances plant growth: click1, click2

Also, CO2 rises as a result of increasing temperature: click. The cause and effect relationship between CO2 and temperature show that CO2 irises as a result of rising temperature, not vice versa.

Since there is no measurable evidence that CO2 can cause runaway global warming — or any warming for that matter [which was the original reason given for spending immense amounts of capital and reversing technological progress], then that money should be left in the hands of the taxpaying public, except for the amount necessary to support other areas of science that have been starved of funding due to the AGW scare.

Oh and Gazelle….
If your conention is that the climate is highly sensitive to small changes in energy input, and at the same time you want to claim that the MWP was limited to Europe, can you explain what kept the energy confined to Europe for a few centuries? If the climate is highly sensitive, then that extra energy in Europe should have gone zooming around the planet. If it didn’t, that would imply a highly insensitive climate. So either the MWP was local to Europe and proves that the climate is insensitive on a massive scale and we need not panic about minor CO2 changes, or we conclude that if the climate is highly sensitive, the MWP must have been global.

don’t you just hate it when your own argument is evidence that you are wrong?

You then say to me, “And even if it were [global], so what? We know full well that other processes besides GHG forcing can warm the entire globe, so the denial of that fact proves nothing.”

Permit me to interpret your logic. Conceding that the MWP might be global after all, you try and downplay its significance by saying that other processes besides GHG forcing can warm the entire globe. And I retort, “why yes it can, isn’t this what skeptics have been saying all along?”

Then you infer from this sudden insight that this “proves nothing”. Well, that entirely depends on what it is you are trying to prove. If it is the fact that the climate moves in natural cycles, then you are correct – it proves nothing. But if you are trying to prove the hypothesis that only man made GHG’s can be responsible for most of the current warming, and it is then shown that the globe was in fact warmer in the middle ages, then you are not able to falsify the null hypothesis – that current warming is due mostly to natural variation.

I think you will find this is exactly why the alarmists have fought like demons to keep the hockey stick alive, for no less a reason than the belief in a stable climate is one of the four pillars of the AGW hypothesis. That is exactly why the MWP is described as “putative.”

BTW, when can you post the reference for your 3C temp rise for CO2 doubling without feedbacks, that has been established since 1979?

Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (09:00:57) :
“Steven Mosher, if you don’t like the HadCRUT data, you are aware of the existence and essential similarity of of the NCDC GHCN and the NASA GISSTEMP data right? And that HadCRUT actually gives a warming rate that is more conservative (i.e. slightly LESS) than GISSTEMP?”

Gosh, inspector! Thanks for that info. Maybe you should google me and see what I know about GHCN.. (hint hint, free the code, see 2007 climateaudit, RC, or you can google me on nightlights and gisstemp.. here lemme help

or maybe some of the ca thread where I slogged through nasa code, i dunno.

Now to you:

1. I never said I dont like hadcrut data. I said I asked for hadcrut data and CRU said.
A. it was all in GHCN (false)
B. 2% wasnt in GHCN and was confidential. (false)
C. They couldnt really tell me how much of it was confidential since they
lost the agreements ( True)
D. They couldnt give me the data because I wasnt an academic (FALSE)
E. the couldnt give it to me becuase of conditions put on them
in agreements which they lost (who knows)
F. They know they gave it to other guys, but that was a mistake they
could not repeat without international relations being damaged (FALSE)
G. They know they left a version of the data(2003) on the web by mistake,
but that didnt mean the data wasnt super secret.
H. Oops, they lost some of the data anyways.(true)

So, I’m neither HAPPY or UNHAPPY with the CRU data. My emotional state has nothing to do with the question. very simply they cannot tell a consistent story about what data they had, what data they have, where they got it, who they gave it to. Its a mess. Provenance is a word you should look up. You do not know that the data CRU uses is
essentially similar to the data used by GISS or NOAA. What you have
is their WORD. ” we get most of our data from GHCN” Well, do they?
how would you check that? you would ask them for their copy of the data
and then you would go to GHCN and get the data yourself. then you would
compare the two. Yup, same data. Or Nope, they borked it up.

Now, GISS says the same thing. They say: we get our data from GHCN.
and they name the file. GISS also give me the code. So I can do the following
I can download the GHCN data and I can look at the nasa code and actualy se that they download the RIGHT DATA. and I can check that their code does not BORK UP THE INPUT. Now why is this important. This is important
because IN THE PAST giss DID BORK UP THE INPUT. thats’ hansens y2K problem. doh. you must be new here.

So basically we do not KNOW that cru use essentially the same data.
you’ve READ THAT, but you have not verified that. and you cant verify that without access to the code and data. But lets stipulate that they use “essentially” the same data. There remain two questions:

1. How do they process that data.
2. Is the data they process raw data or has it been adjusted.

#1. The reason why I request code is because all three agencies ( CRU,GISS,NOAA) process the data differently. From “creating” reference stations by combining scribal versions, to handling the artic differently, to average grids that span both ocean and land differently.. lots of differences.
Do they matter? I dunno, Phil Jones in the mails is highly critical of GISS.
I dunno the IPCC uses CRU. I dunno all the paleo work uses CRU. It would seem logical that these differences either matter or they dont. If they dont matter then what is the point of having three agencies process the same data to come up with three slightly different answers? Ahhh the false appearence of independent lines of evidence. Finally, GISS treats UHI differently than CRU. CRU dont even adjust for it. So if you compare the gridded temp for the US from CRU with that from GISS the difference is on the order of .5C

#2. Is GHCN raw? what version does each agency use?
you see you have to start at the top of the chain. GISS,CRU,NOAA
all point at the GHCN database (plus extra bits) So we start by actually seeing if they got the data they claim to have gotten.They we look at how they processed it. THEN we take the next step down the rabbit hole
and look at the GHCN data. What do we see? not raw data, but processed data. That means we have more auditing to do all the way back to the paper forms.

And yes I am quite aware that Hadcru is cooler. Do you know why?
The problem is this. The IPCC wants to use Hadcru. Their choice not mine.
That line of evidence needs to be defended. Gimme the data and code.
If you would rather everyone use GISS, fine. I got a whole different set of questions there. Let me put it simply for you.

1. Its is warming.
2. All three indices claim to use essentially the same data
3. All three process that data differently.
4. All three have roughly the same answer.

Unfortunately, none of those “facts” has any logical bearing whatsoever
on the question that I am asking. What is the best estimate of the warming seen in the thermometer record? Is it .6C warmer? .65C? .57C? and
what is our confidence in that.

You continue:

“I’m all for complete open-ness of data and methods, and maybe CRU really SHOULD have been more open with all theirs, and maybe they really DO need to reform their data policies. But to jump to conspiracy theories and presumptions about who meant what in email messages over the last decade, as “proof” of this or that intent, is simply foolish.”

Why the weasel words? Look in 2007 I did an analysis of US temperatures
using USHCN data. The exact Same dataset used by NASA. I selected a different sample of stations than Hansen did. Guess what? I showed a cooling trend. I actually did. It was easy. Unfortunately I lost the computer it was on. So, should you believe me? If they will not share the data and the code, ITS NOT SCIENCE. its hearsay. If two other guys tell me the same story sort of kind of, ITS STILL NOT SCIENCE.

In any case After reading the mails I would suggest that you write Mann and tell him that its silly to believe in conspiracies.

“Approximately 40% of the uncertainty related to projected warming of the twenty-first century stems from the unknown behaviour of the carbon cycle, which is an important component of the global climate system.”

Does this mean that there are research groups which believe there are these ‘uncertainties’? If so, how many such scientists are there, and are they influential, currently, in climate science?

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong,–H.L. Mencken

Interesting. I’ve seen my version attributed to Einstein on several occassions. In researching it I found your version as well as several more going all the way back to confuscious. A more appropriate Einstein quote might be:

“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

Thanks much for making me aware of that paper. I will have a look at it asap and see if I can give you a decent response. Unlike the others here, it appears possible to have a discussion based on science with you. But I do wonder if you have read the full paper, and if so, what your take on it is.

S. Mosher:

So, you’ve managed the time to read Mike Mann’s (stolen) emails, AND formed a judgment of his scientific abilities therefrom. Good job. Now try reading his PAPERS and doing same instead. I mean, you’re all about the validity of the science aren’t you? That’s why you’re so concerned with the accuracy of the HADCRUT output right?

As for McIntryre, he has proven only that he cannot see the forest for the trees when it comes to paleo reconstructions, imagining himself some sort of statistical guru, even though he doesn’t understand basic principles of statistical analysis. That’s why he obsesses on principal components methods instead of the overall signal:noise ratio of the data and robustness of results to varying methods. He thinks that because he has some expertise in a specific technical area, that he can nullify the results of complex scientific findings. Well he doesn’t, and he hasn’t, as the NAS 2006 report made clear. And that’s why he will never be taken seriously, because those who DO have that training, know, from his writings, that he does not. Now, forget McIntyre’s “blog science”–what exactly in Mann et al 2008, or 2009, do you specifically object to, and why? And if you have any such objections, do you plan to submit them for publication somewhere, so as to improve the science?

Now, as for your obsession with HADCRUT data “secrecy”. You have one of two motives. Either you’re interested in finding out the likely spatio-temporal patterns of the instrumental record, in which case you could turn to the GISSTEMP or NCDC data/analyses (and check them against HADCRUT if you want, like Jim Hansen has just done), OR you’re interested in trying to paint a picture of complicity between CRU and the IPCC, in order to cast doubt on the whole notion that GHGs have warmed the planet over the last 130 years. Or is there maybe a third option that I’ve missed?

And yes I know why HADCRUT is cooler than GISSTEMP. As to your whole argument about the possible differences in the 3 data sets, have you read Jim Hansen’t recent analysis comparing GISSTEMP with HADCRUT? (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100115_Temperature2009.pdf) How can you explain their identity if they are not based on the same essential data and methods?

Vincent: Sorry to disappoint. Can you explain to me why any or all of the references you have listed in your comment, provide a superior reconstruction over the last millenium than the two papers by Mann et al. in 08 and 09? Because if you can, I will certainly have a look. But if you can’t, I’m too busy reading dozens of other papers to waste my time when I know I trust the basic methods and approaches of Mike Mann and his co-authors. Alternatively, you could just point out where you think there might be methodological errors in those two papers.

davidmhoffer:

Try to stay on topic and follow the thread David, hard as it seems to be for you. As I said before, take it up with J.Peden if you don’t like the greenhouse analogy, instead of parsing every word said in response to his claim. But I now fully realize that this is how you deniers operate–you try to lose people in the weeds of a blog/word labyrinth instead of addressing the actual topics inherent in the science. In fact, that’s pretty much all you people do, and the reason is pretty obvious: you don’t have a scientific argument. One learns a lot more about human psychology from people like you, than anything regarding the earth’s climate patterns. And with that, I’m done interacting with you.

Anand, if I understand you correctly, you are asking whether warm events can create an elevated atmospheric [CO2], via carbon cycle feedback, that lingers for up to a millenium. I don’t know, but it is certainly worth asking, and would depend on the magnitude of the spike, the subsequent temperatures, and the time integral of the available sink strengths after the spike.

What I do know is that is that the ice core [CO2] record, and the current atmospheric C 13/12 ratio, show no evidence of such a thing occurring.

Inspector of Gazelle Leavings: methinks you have encountered some brick walls. That is the result of existing in an echo chamber built on misinformation. You should have looked more closely at your heroes papers and the resulting refutations of said papers. You can learn a lot by reading the vast quantities of information available to sift through and digest on this most amazing, open blog know as Watt’s Up With That? The Yamal issue was certainly the deathblow for Mann’s work. Tree-ring proxy=bad idea. Using only 16 trees and being caught doing that=priceless. I’ve got a lot more, just say the word. I guess I am a “high functioning” learning disabled. What is your excuse?

Glad you’re enlightened Richard. Would it help the world know me better if I called myself Tom Smith, or maybe, say, Richard Sharpe? Or we could make a game of it–I contribute frequently elsewhere, so who do you think I might be?

Oh and Vincent: no problem if you want to interpret my logic, but it would help some if you read what I said first. If you did, you would see that I did not, and do not, concede that the MWP was a global phenomenon (as Mann et al 2009 makes very clear). For some reason, deniers are hell bent on proving that it was, as if this proves…something or other. The point was that even if it WAS a global phenom., AGW as a concept emphatically does NOT deny that other forcings can warm the planet (even though [GHGs] are very often intimately involved with such warmings, often as a strong feedback). The IPCC reports are very clear about that.

One more thing. Could we have had this “discussion” over at unRealclimate? The fact that you are able to post on this site even though you vehemently disagree with everyone here ( like “in the pay of big oil” isn’t the original conspiracy theory), is very telling to the person who is sitting on the fence. They read both sites. Ask questions because they want to learn both sides. At RC they are mocked and made fun of. Here, many poster jump in to help that person find the information they are seeking. Are you so blind that you cannot see that people are turning away from sites like RC. In Canada, nobody is watching the CBC (except for the curling perhaps), and they cannot understand that it is because they are cramming AGW down peoples throats incessantly. No balance. Everybody is dumb, but you are not smart enough to know you are dumb.

Gazelle
One learns a lot more about human psychology from people like you, than anything regarding the earth’s climate patterns. And with that, I’m done interacting with you.>

I’m devastated. You failed to answer even a single one of the major points I made, not one logical explanation of the physics I suggested you weren’t accounting for, failed to deal with both cases in which I pointed out that you were contradicting your own positions, and the best you can do now is an insulting paragraph complaining about parsing every word (I think that’s a reference to one of the cases where you contradict yourself and I pointed it out?) and then a refusal to continue interacting with me.

Summary; Gazelle can dish it out, but he can’t take it. He can launch arguments and accusations, but he can’t defend them. When caught presenting conflicting evidence he sulks and refuses to interact anymore.

That’s unfortunate Gazelle, because if you engaged in honest discourse, you and I might both learn something. The fact that you can’t even defend your own positions and resort to insults and refusal to “interact” further instead of putting forth a logical argument only serves to confirm in the minds of those with whom you disagree, that there was no validity to your position in the first place. Consider what an opportunity you have lost and the manner in which you have discredited yourself and those with whom you agree. I believe you can do better.

David Ball, do you feel better now? I hope so, because I’d like to hear your rational response to the following.

“The Yamal issue was certainly the deathblow for Mann’s work. Tree-ring proxy=bad idea. Using only 16 trees and being caught doing that=priceless. I’ve got a lot more, just say the word. I guess I am a “high functioning” learning disabled. What is your excuse?”

Uh, don’t know, that I actually read the literature maybe?

This comment shows that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. First, the Yamal “issue”, created entirely by McIntyre, had to do with Keith Briffa’s reanalysis of data originally collected by Hantemirov and Shiyatov, but analyzed by them under a method that did not preserve low frequency temporal variation, which Briffa was trying to do over a large area of Eurasia (hence his use of their, and others’, data). Mann had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Tree ring data can be influenced by multiple factors such as variations in precipitation, disease, growth of other nearby trees, and so on. The biggest issue however, is that far northern sites (such as yamal in siberia) have very short growing seasons. As a consequence, the tree rings are reflective of climate for the growing season only, not for the entire year. Any climactic variations that are more pronounced in the fall, winter and early spring would not be reflected in the tree rings themselves. Tree rings are an excellent dendrochronoligical tool, provided that they are interpreted in concert with other reconstruction techniques to identify any periods of time in which the tree ring data departed from the climactic annual data due. A reading of several of Briffa’s papers exposes that not only was this not done, even the normalization to weather station data was done using only growing season records and not annual records.

I have no idea what I am talking about? Hantemirov and Shiyatov have come out and stated the data was misused. That only certain select groups were used and McIntyre showed very clearly how badly the data selection process was done. Not even worthy of a second year student. Now let us discuss this tree-ring proxy. It has been known for nearly 3 decades that tree-ring proxies are a poor indicator of temperature. It is an indicator of many differing variables, the least of which is temperature. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/28/a-look-at-treemometers-and-tree-ring-growth/ I remember dinner table discussion between my father and his colleagues nearly 30 years ago and they knew then how poor a proxy tree-rings were. Mann was told by his own handlers not to use them due to their inherent issues. Here is another great and informative thread that demolishes the work of your Mann http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/30/yamal-treering-proxy-temperature-reconstructions-dont-match-local-thermometer-records/ Anyone can grasp that a tree can be affected by so many other variables that would give misleading representations. Drought, disease, shade from surrounding trees, available nutrients, soil composition, soil density. Should I go on? ” Mann had absolutely nothing to do with it”, yet he used the data anyway because it supported his predetermination. The accusation that McIntyre “made it up” is spurious at best, and a lot dismissive. You will have to do better than that. To insinuate that I have not read the literature is an insult that I shall not let pass. I am glad that you have decided for yourself that we are all idiots, for your underestimation of us will be your undoing. You really have to get out more and find out that what you are basing your beliefs on is a pile of poor science.

Before you spew about using WUWT? posts to back up my position, I used them intentionally to show you that the science is thoroughly discussed here all the time. All sides, not just our own views. We also discuss things that are affected by climate such as policy. It is sad that the climate and weather that interests us so much has been moved to the political arena, but that was NOT the skeptics doing. Stick around, but be more polite. You will be challenged at every turn, but you will laugh and you will learn. This is truly a fun blog. Peace !!!

Mr Gazelle:
I believe we’ve reached a point in the discussion where I can draw some preliminary conclusions.

You wonder whether “…warm events can create an elevated atmospheric [CO2], via carbon cycle feedback, that lingers for up to a millenium”.

That was certainly one of the aspects what I was intending to bring up. The other one being the more harmless preceding conclusion that a proportion of the present-day rise could be due to earlier warming. But a conclusion no anthropogenicity advocate would allow nevertheless.

In any event, as you state, the answer is not clearly known. In my limited knowledge I am not aware of papers that address this question (and I have my own theories as to why). So I do concur that this “… is certainly worth asking, and would depend on the magnitude of the spike, the subsequent temperatures, and the time integral of the available sink strengths after the spike.”

Having been in agreement to this point – if rising temperatures can lead to a lagged CO2 rise, and rising CO2 can cause ‘instant’ temperature rise (speaking of timescales climatologically, of course) – we have already set up for ourselves an accelerating upward spiral of positive feedback from which there is no escape. Because if such were the property of the climate and the gas CO2, at some point in the geologic past the aforesaid sequence would have transpired (the probability of in this case is very high – 0.25).

But the available proxy reconstructions certainly do not show any such event to have transpired.

This, in itself, should be enough to give up the alarmism in the theory of anthropogenic warming.

And if we take the one final plunge – if we assume for a moment that rising CO2 does not cause runaway warming (but can cause, lets say other kinds of warming) – we can also see why temperatures should ever fall at all following a period of CO2 rise. There must be operational, forces that pull temperatures down even in a state of high atmospheric CO2. Maybe the diminishing trapping of heat with increasing concentrations of CO2 passively contributes.

Even without this conjecture, can we agree that there were points in the timescale when CO2 levels were rising or had reached a certain high, but temperatures were beginning to fall?

More reason to give up alarmism.

I have not fully taken in the latest Nature paper. I read the abstract and the conclusions. But it looks interesting to me.

Thanks
Anand

BTW: You lost the original argument you entered this thread with. Comprehensively. The admission is there in your own words. :)

Well forgive me davidmhoffer, if I didn’t respond properly to your cogent “arguments” about gazelles accelerating forever and radiation numbers apparently pulled from a random number generator, etc., notwithstanding the fact that the preceding discussions gave no reason for same. Let’s just say I was speechless and trying to fend off the other wolves. After all, I am just a gazelle.

But you say you want honest discourse, so wrt your explanation of why tree rings are a problem as a proxy, here you go:

First, the factors that cause the variations you mention, are well known, and are explicitly accounted for in the tree ring data collection and analysis process, via the collection of numerous cores, use of appropriate detrending techniques, and various other statistical analyses, such as the mean interseries correlation, the expressed population signal, and the calculation of the biweight robust mean to eliminate outliers.

Second, ALL dendro sites in which temperature is the reconstruction focus, be they boreal or alpine, necessarily have a short growing season. That’s inherent to a thermally limited site. Although you are correct that their growth is (usually) primarily dominated by the growing season weather, that is not exclusively true, because the dormant season temperatures, especially of the preceding spring but also the winter in some cases, can affect the rings through their effects on dormancy processes and subsequent spring phenology. This is why many dendro studies look for relationships of the ring variables with climate parameters of various different seasons (because there may well be effects in addition to those from the growing season). So it is appropriate to estimate the seasonal temperature from a calibration of same with the ring data. At the same time, however, the instrumental record shows a strong correlation, at large spatio-temporal scales, of seasonal with annual temperature patterns. It is therefore fair to infer, in studies at such scales, that the ring variations represent not just the trend in the seasonal Ts, but in the annual Ts as well.

I might add that this same principal of using the known correlation structure from the instrumental record–in this case of seasonal with the annual–and applying it to the proxy data, is the basis for the ability to estimate the spatial pattern of former temperatures from the spatially non-homogeneous proxy record, as in Mann et al 2009.

I’m not arguing that tree ring data are perfect proxies–they’re not (no proxy is). But they’re biggest problems are not the ones you’ve mentioned.

Complete and utter bogus BS. And if Watts wrote something that says what you claim, that is the same. You think all these folks have been doing dendroclimatology for 100 years and getting it wrong becuase rings don’t respond to T??????

“I remember dinner table discussion between my father and his colleagues nearly 30 years ago and they knew then how poor a proxy tree-rings were.”

You’re seriously saying this is some kind of evidence are you?

“Mann was told by his own handlers not to use them due to their inherent issues.”

“Anyone can grasp that a tree can be affected by so many other variables that would give misleading representations. Drought, disease, shade from surrounding trees, available nutrients, soil composition, soil density.”

YES, THAT’S WHY THEY DEVELOPED METHODS TO DEAL WITH SUCH OBVIOUSITIES MANY DECADES AGO.

” Should I go on? ”

Depends on how much more you want to incriminate yourself. My advice would be no.

“Mann had absolutely nothing to do with it”, yet he used the data anyway because it supported his predetermination. The accusation that McIntyre “made it up” is spurious at best, and a lot dismissive. You will have to do better than that. To insinuate that I have not read the literature is an insult that I shall not let pass.”

Then prove that you know anything about this topic instead of being utterly infatuated with McIntyre’s “analyses” and making idiotic statements. What you completely fail to understand is that Yamal has no effect on large scale T reconstructions, even if it was fabricated, which it wasn’t.

“I am glad that you have decided for yourself that we are all idiots”

I hadn’t actually, but I will say I’m getting closer.

“You really have to get out more and find out that what you are basing your beliefs on is a pile of poor science.”

Care to join me in the field this summer for some tree coring? Or at the computer afterwards for the analysis? Or in between for the core processing? That would give you a real good idea of what we actually do, and why. Bear in mind that like many scientists, I have little money (actually none) to offer for payment for your help, because I have no grant to support the work. Contrary to what you may have read about us scientists, we do it because we love it and we love answering questions. So if you have the same motives, you’re welcome to join me.

Anand: The paper is important and germane to your questions/comments. Try to get a copy and read it. Email David Frank and ask him for a copy if you don’t have access–he’s a very nice guy and will likely send it to you. More tomorrow. Sleep time.

“So, you’ve managed the time to read Mike Mann’s (stolen) emails, AND formed a judgment of his scientific abilities therefrom. Good job. Now try reading his PAPERS and doing same instead. I mean, you’re all about the validity of the science aren’t you? That’s why you’re so concerned with the accuracy of the HADCRUT output right?”

1. I read the mails. you have not.
2. No analysis of the mails internals or externals can reveal whether they
are “stolen” or not.
3. Stolen or not they say what they say.
4. My point was about BELIEF IN CONSPIRACY. you had accused people here of believing in a conspiracy. I was pointing out that you should read Mann’s mails in that regard.
5. can you not read?

WRT mann’s science ( and others)
1. yes I have read the papers.
2. There are numerous errors that render them pointless.
3. Osborne himself had issues with the Mann residuals and the calculation
of confidence intervals.
4. Mann lied about his giving data to McIntyre. Osborn’s mails show that Osborn knew this.
5. Mann has admitted he is no statistician.
6. The pick two strategy for determining which grid to run the correlation
on is bogus.
7. using sediment proxys that are contaminated is bogus.
8. bristecones? bogus
9. Foxtails? bogus.
10. yamal? bogus ( RCS when the core count drops to 5 is bogus and you know it)
11. Shall we go on?

Basically this. Mann has made multiple errors over the course of his career.
At first I would have just attributed it to stupidity ( he said he was no statistician) Then I attributed it to willful ignorance. ( not fixing simple errors like mislocating errors in locating proxies after being informed of the error) After I read the mails
my diagnosis is a full blown paranoid break with reality and no statistical understanding.

“Now, as for your obsession with HADCRUT data “secrecy”. You have one of two motives. Either you’re interested in finding out the likely spatio-temporal patterns of the instrumental record, in which case you could turn to the GISSTEMP or NCDC data/analyses (and check them against HADCRUT if you want, like Jim Hansen has just done), OR you’re interested in trying to paint a picture of complicity between CRU and the IPCC, in order to cast doubt on the whole notion that GHGs have warmed the planet over the last 130 years. Or is there maybe a third option that I’ve missed?”

Wrong. I believe that GHGs have warmed the planet and will continue to warm the planet if we do not change our policies. I am on the record saying this for a long ass time. Like I said I worked with Modtran and Hitran Source code and had to actually operate the models as a part of my job. I do not believe there is any complicity between CRU and the IPCC.
WRT the GTI ( global temp index). It seems clear from the literature that
HADCRU is accepted as the defacto standard. So I start there.
1. They claim a UHI contamination of .05C-.1C per century. they do not
REMOVE this effect. They expand the error bands. I believe this is not
the best approach, especially if one is trying to reconstruct the past
based on correlation with the present.
2. based on Mickittrick papers I believe UHI contamination to be greater
than .05C century. Perhaps as much as .3C ( over land of course)
3. My principles ( based on my past affliation with Open source) demand
Open source and Open data.
4. My Politics demand transparency.
5. My philosophy of science demands it ( ya ya philosophy major)
6. I love numbers and data analysis.
7. I like to see for myself.

“And yes I know why HADCRUT is cooler than GISSTEMP. As to your whole argument about the possible differences in the 3 data sets, have you read Jim Hansen’t recent analysis comparing GISSTEMP with HADCRUT? (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100115_Temperature2009.pdf) How can you explain their identity if they are not based on the same essential data and methods?”

Yup read that. Problem. Its not science. i see charts and graphs.
No data; no code = no science. I dont see why you dont get this.
let me make it brutally simple. ITS WORDS ON A PAGE. its an advertisement
for an analysis. As a former data analyst, I would have been fired for not
producing a reproducible piece of work. TurnKey. Beyond THAT
I’m not interested in explaining their identity. If I was I would NOT merely look at a paper. I would get the data and code for both and do an in depth analysis. For example, GISS has some really odd ways of building a reference stations. Nightlights is a mess. ROW urban adjustments are a mess. In Hadcru the handling of land/sea grids is messed up ( hint you have to read the documents in the documents folder to see the proposal to fix this. ) Further, I would fully expect there to be large agreement between the two. That Still leaves my question which you dont want to answer.

1. Which is the BEST ( why have more than one)
2. IS UHI properly accounted for ( I think not, GISS adjusts for it, CRU do not )
3. next step.. GHCN audit. for example GHCN is adjusted data ( at least in the us) Those adjustments, tobs,flinet,shap, etc have to be audited. Further
adjusting is really not the best approach statistically. Finally if you do adjust you have to carry the error forward. GHCN dont.

next.

Oh I numbered points so you can actually respond to what I say rather than try the tangent man approach. Ritilan works, try it. focus.

Complete and utter bogus BS. And if Watts wrote something that says what you claim, that is the same. You think all these folks have been doing dendroclimatology for 100 years and getting it wrong becuase rings don’t respond to T??????

Nobody said tree-rings don’t respond to temperature, and certainly David Ball did not say so. He said, specifically, that tree-rings are a poor indicator of temperature. Why? There are several reasons, but most importantly, they respond in a non-linear fashion to temperature, a non-linearity that is a function of other input variables, i.e., the inputs are correlated. One of these inputs is CO2 which has a cause-effect relationship to temperature by hypothesis.

You’re seriously saying this is some kind of evidence are you?

Uh, his father is Dr. Tim Ball, someone that made a career out of studying the weather and climate.

Right.

In other words “I can’t refute what was shown therefore I’ll simply say something snarky and thus I win!” Silly.

YES, THAT’S WHY THEY DEVELOPED METHODS TO DEAL WITH SUCH OBVIOUSITIES MANY DECADES AGO.

Really? What are these methods? Disentangling correlated inputs that effect a system in a non-linear manner is a seriously difficult problem to solve. All of the techniques we have seen used to reconstruct past temperatures are linear and require uncorrelated signals. If you have some magic sauce that has been hidden from the rest of us, you should publish. Otherwise, I would suggest that you not make claims regarding things you clearly do not understand.

Depends on how much more you want to incriminate yourself. My advice would be no.

Indeed. That last one you told was a whopper.

I hadn’t actually, but I will say I’m getting closer.

You have, at best, demonstrated that you don’t understand the issues David Ball is discussing.

Care to join me in the field this summer for some tree coring? Or at the computer afterwards for the analysis? Or in between for the core processing? That would give you a real good idea of what we actually do, and why.

Wow. So you’re actually doing field work and you did not realize the non-linear response problem? Or that every method (to date) used to extract “signals” requires uncorrelated inputs? That’s… sad.

Contrary to what you may have read about us scientists, we do it because we love it and we love answering questions.

I suggest you come up with better answers for the questions. I’m guessing that you are some sort of student, so maybe you really don’t understand the problems yet. The basics of why non-linearity and correlated sources are a problem can be found in any introductory text on component analysis. You might need some prep coursework in random variables, however, since that sets the stage for the basic statistical properties of the matrices that are being manipulated via these linear extraction methods. Furthermore, a class in linear algebra would be useful as well.

You say to me that you’re too busy to read the papers I have cited and that I should explain them to you. On the other hand you cite Mann’s papers and then expect me to pont out errors in them whilst you ignore mine. This seems very one sided to me, but since you ask me to explain mine to you, I am assuming your request is sincere, and therefore I have posted some brief summaries below.

1. Lonnie Thompson et al (2003) analyzed decadally-averaged δ18O records derived by him and his colleagues from three Andean and three Tibetan ice cores, and concluded that peak temperatures of the MWP were warmer than those of the last few decades of the 20th century.

2. Gonni et al (2004) determined that the highest sea surface temperatures at that location over the past 6000 years “were measured during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and that evident that peak MWP temperatures were approximately 0.35°C warmer than peak Current Warm Period temperatures, and that they were fully 0.95°C warmer than the mean temperature of the last few years of the 20th century.

3. Sepulvada et al (2009). The authors derived alkenone-based spring/summer sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) from a marine sedimentary record obtained from Jacaf Fjord in northern Chilean Patagonia. They observed two different regimes of climate variability in their record: “a relatively dry/warm period before 900 cal yr BP (higher runoff and average SST 1°C warmer than present day).

4. Holmgren K, et al (2001). Maximum annual air temperatures in the vicinity of Cold Air Cave (24°1’S, 29°11’E) in the Makapansgat Valley of South Africa were inferred from a relationship between color variations in banded growth-layer laminations of a well-dated stalagmite and the air temperature of a surrounding 49-station climatological network developed over the period 1981-1995, as well as a quasi-decadal-resolution record of oxygen and carbon stable isotopes (MWP: AD 800-1100): Peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period was as much as 2.5°C warmer than the Current Warm Period (AD 1961-1990 mean).

5. Wilson A. T et al (1979). Temperatures derived from an 18O/16O profile through a stalagmite found in a New Zealand cave (40.67°S, 172.43°E) revealed the Medieval Warm Period to have occurred between AD 1050 and 1400 and to have been 0.75°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.

6. Dansgard W., et al (1975). They used oxygen isotope analysis based on an ice core retrieved from Crête, Central Greenland to derive a proxy temperature record for the region for the past 1400 years. They estimated that peak Medieval Warmth was about 0.6°C greater than it is presently.

You ask me why I should trust these papers over Mann. Good question. First, note that I have cited only a tiny proportion of available papers – there are hundreds of papers co-authored by 800 scientists. Secondly, these paleoclimatic research papers draw conclusions which are supported by research from historians and archeologists, and its this convergence of conclusions from diverse sources that gives us confidence in their accuracy. Thirdly, all these studies pass the test of “independence” at every level. The researchers are independent and large in number, and the proxies themselves are diverse and independent.

So, in order to ignore the MWP, here’s what you have to do. You have to walk pass this mountain of evidence that attests to it being a real, global event in order to pick up this tiny mole hill by a tiny number of scientists, some of whom have had previous work debunked (Mann vs Wegman, Mann vs McIntyre). You claim that Mann’s previous (MBH98) research was sound. I’m sorry, I don’t believe you for the same reason that I don’t believe that Mann’s 2008 paper can overturn a generation of multi-disciplinary evidence. Even if it contains no obvious errors, it just isn’t enough to overturn the scientific consensus. Call me old fashioned, but I like my science to be evidence driven not agenda driven.

Gazelle
Well forgive me davidmhoffer, if I didn’t respond properly to your cogent “arguments” about gazelles accelerating forever and radiation numbers apparently pulled from a random number generator, etc., >

Wow. I explained the physics and your response clearly indicated that you didn’t understand. I used an analogy to illustrate the point, which you also dismissed. In both cases though, you failed to adddress the points, ask clarification questions, or provide reasons why they weren’t valid. As for radiation numbers…. radiation comes from the decay of elements like uranium. Radiance is the energy emitted by a body based on its temperature. As for the numbers being random, they were calculated using stefan boltzman which you are so find of bringing up when it is convenient to, and I said so in our discourse. If you believe any specific number is wrong, then state which one you think is wrong and why. That’s how evidence is either confirmed or discredited. Simply claiming it was generated by random adds nothing to the discussion accept to high light once again your avoidance of confronting directly any facts that don’t agree with your position. But frankly, what are you attempting to accomplish here?

Last summer a drunken hooker stumbled into the side of my parked car. She promptly accused the car of having tried to run her over and began kicking the door. When I attempted to stop her, she told me to eff off. Then (I kid you not) she told me I owed her $50 for the oral sex she had just given me. While her facts and conclusions were all in dispute, I could at least follow her logic. Yours not so much. I conclude that you are either SO far over your head that you don’t know you are drowning, or you are a skeptic in disguise attempting to discredit AGW by doing a bad job of supporting it.

si (02:22:15) :
You’re very selective on this blog. You show a graph of artic temperatures on from the Centre for Ocean and Ice the right hand side there- would you like to see their graph of sea ice coverage?

Here’s another graph from a different source. It doesn’t match yours, but it does the one on this blog.

I assume you have had a 300 level ” plant physiology for dendrologists” course (probably also true for Mann). I’ve had at least seven post graduate courses in physiology or closely related courses (plant response to environment, ecology, two plant physiology – one master – one doctoral level, physiology of crop production, dendrology, molecular genetics (physiological alterations). I think you need to dig a little deeper. For example:

Effects of seasonal and interannual climate variability on net ecosystem productivity of boreal deciduous and conifer forests.
M. A. Arain, T. A. Black, A. G. Barr, P. G. Jarvis, J. M. Massheder, D. L. Verseghy, and Z. Nesic
Abstract: The response of net ecosystem productivity (NEP) and evaporation in a boreal aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) forest and a black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) BSP) forest in Canada was compared using a newly developed realistic model of surface-atmosphere exchanges of carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor, and energy as well as eddy covariance flux measurements made over a 6-year period (1994-1999). The model was developed by incorporating a process-based two-leaf (sunlit and shaded) canopy conductance and photosynthesis submodel in the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS). A simple submodel of autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration was combined with the photosynthesis model to simulate NEP. The model performed well in simulating half-hourly, daily, and monthly mean CO2 exchange and evaporation values in both deciduous and coniferous forests. Modeled and measured results showed a linear relationship between CO2 uptake and evaporation, and for each kilogram of water transpired, approximately 3 g of carbon (C) were photosynthesized by both ecosystems. The model results confirmed that the aspen forest was a weak to moderate C sink with considerable interannual variability in C uptake. In the growing season, the C uptake capacity of the aspen forest was over twice that of the black spruce forest. Warm springs enhanced NEP in both forests; however, high mid-summer temperatures appear to have significantly reduced NEP at the black spruce forest as a result of increased respiration. The model suggests that the black spruce forest is a weak C sink in cool years and a weak C source in warm years. These results show that the C balance of these two forests is sensitive to seasonal and interannual climatic variability and stresses the importance of continuous long-term flux measurement to confirm modeling results.

Mann’s tree ring analysis is based on a linear relationship between temperature and growth. There is no such thing. A linear relationship exists between growth and water.

More references are at the end of this paper. When you wade through these, you can re-enter the discussion.

I have about a dozen native red oak in my back yard. They were here before the house was built, so they are over 100 years old. They tower over the house, so probably in the 150 to 200 foot range. About 20 years ago we had a very nasty late spring frost. The base of the leaves mostly survived, but the outer 2/3 died. One of the oaks stands well apart from the others at the edge of an open field. The frost hit it much harder than the others. There was barely anything green on that tree that year, I thought it would die. It didn’t, but it took a good ten years for it to recover and show normal year to year growth.

Now if someone cores that tree a thousand years from now, they would have absolutely no way of knowing that. Any conclusions that they drew from suppressed tree ring growth regarding climate for that 10 year period would be dead wrong.

I refuse to disclose the location of the trees, the year in which the frost occured, what method I chose to conclude that the recovery period was 10 years, and I will not provide any data on the growth of the other oak trees during the same period to compare to. As a result, my conclusions cannot be disputed and must be accepted as fact once they have been peer reviewed. I will disclose the required information to qualified peers for review provided that they sign a non-disclosure in advance, and agree to publish their peer review only in the event that their conclusions agree with mine.

I admit that I am not an expert in dendrochronology. I am able to have a decent discussion on the subject with the knowledge I do have. My sincere hope is that the general public will gain the ability to understand a lot of what is presented to them in regards to climate. You do not need a Phd to grasp the essence of most papers, but you do need to have some knowledge of the basics. Gazelle offered to have me join him whilst taking core samples. I would love to do that! As many here are aware, I have spent the majority of my life in the great outdoors. I would invite Gazelle to join me in some winter camping up in the “great white North”. Should we make it for a month or so? I think the producers of “Survivor” should do a challenge on “Lake of the Woods” in January. That would be a real challenge. Many of you have also noticed that I am not that computer savvy. My access to a computer has only been in the last half dozen years, and I accept my less than stellar computing skills as a consequence of my time outdoors. Wouldn’t change it for the world, as I have memories that I intend to add to. Have you ever seen a “cinnamon” bear? They are the color of a deer. Very cool. Two young bald eagles play fighting at about 500 feet in the air. A lynx taking a jack rabbit up in a tree for lunch. Pack of wolves crossing a frozen lake in winter. Obviously, I have a deep rooted love, respect and understanding of nature. Gazelle has made many assumptions about who he was talking to. He was wrong.

David Ball – { I would invite Gazelle to join me in some winter camping up in the “great white North”. Should we make it for a month or so? I think the producers of “Survivor” should do a challenge on “Lake of the Woods” in January.}

Lake of the Woods? Hmmm… we might be neighbours (well on a global scale anyway). I think a couple of months of continuous ice fishing might be a big one time step, better start him off in a hotel in Kenora and just go out a couple of days at a time.

I once watched two 6 point bucks have it out in my back yard. Almost an hour and less than 50 feet away from my deck. I would trade it though for the eagles play fighting at 500 feet. THAT must have been AWESOME!

sorry, can’t buy into the gazelle is mann theory. Mann could do a lot better job of defending his position and can certainly hold an argument together for more than a couple of ripostes. Perhaps a student of? er… is that the right word? Disciple?

It seems that our Inspector Thompson has been having a bit of fun at your expense. He is a colourful lad and quite the savant. An unlimited source of entertainment for both the staff and his fellow inpatients. We will endeavour to supervise his access to computer/internet resources with more diligence in the future.

It seems that our Inspector Thompson has been having a bit of fun at your expense. He is a colourful lad and quite the savant. An unlimited source of entertainment for both the staff and his fellow inpatients. We will endeavour to supervise his access to computer/internet resources with more diligence in the future.

No, no, no, bring him back! It was a lot of fun. I felt like I was in a Monty Python skit about an argument….

davidmhoffer (08:53:55) : It was awesome!! It was at a place called Black Sturgeon Lake. North of Kenora, Ontario by about 40 minutes. It was like they were laughing as they were playing. The only people I encountered over the 2 weeks I was there was a family of people from the White Dog Reservation very near there. Oh, and howdy neighbor ( I live in Calgary now) but I have a special place in my heart for eastern Manitoba and North Western Ontario. Rugged country, but a fellow who knew what he was doing would have NO problem toughing it out. I would like to add that I enjoy your posts and agree that it is unlikely that our Gazelle would have been the ubiquitous Dr. Mann. I raise a toast to all who posted on this thread, and may the Gazelle be fleet of foot. Cheers

Who wrote that comment? Someone named Gavin with a link back to Realclimate.org.

Add this to the other clues contained herein (well versed on the topic, supporting the same tired AGW viewpoint, born and educated in England therefore a Monty Python fan by default) and I think we can deduce who Gazelle is…

Given the recent path of events wrt climate science, can anyone blame
Gavin Schimdt for wanting to blow off some steam at a “sceptics” blog?

Interesting name choice as a Thompson’s Gazelle jumps frantically left and right to evade the lions at its heels. Wonder if it was a choice relating to subconcious feelings of guilt at misleading those around him,….